Bitter Poetry

foolish you will spill every hope you ever had
squandering your years laughing at the fear of love
you knew
what you know changes from moment to moment
your truth transforming beautiful
beautiful while it yet lived

I would be tutored to unlearn sadness
restored to my right to pursue happiness as though
it was something tangible like
the brass ring on a carousel ride

they taught rats to forget fear after all
erasing shocks as easily as histories are
rewritten

what we made together
plans love refinished
furniture
my flowers
scattered at your feet
all of these were dust and illusion
smoke like your voice
when you spoke
dark velvet and birch bark
years softening us
building something solid in quicksand

I covered myself over in grey like the sky
and a scent like ancient books and roses dry on their stalks
finding pieces to reassemble the machine
this is a peculiar genius
hiding in the light

the room is sealed
forgotten
the furniture eaten through by mice
moths
and small nesting things
draped with dust
I have neglected words too long

she does not push
they fledge on their own
one by one
leaving home
leaving soft down and small piles of bones
the falcon growing season is short

born in the west and also of it
a new old land with the sky wrapped over the mountains
the roundness of the earth needing no explanation
living an american freedom, chauvinistic and unripe
where the soft sun sinks into the sea

there was a mouse in the house
it
knew all their secrets but didn't tell:

yes life was simpler,
clearer -
but so long and lonely -
without love

perhaps the worst is what you learned
to forgive yourself
every sin
and discover destiny
to trample those beneath you
and to burn witches in your flames

how long you longed
for deliverence
when the message came
you were meek enough and
had been weak long enough

can you see now
this power you have always owned

cleft apart were we
one two and three
missed the cleaving mark
but still it hit
I've been waiting putting off
life and pretending that
we are in love

I am really only stealing words, copying the sounds of other voices.

this goddamn of a headache
and what doesn't suit me is the suit I wear
diamonds when I am hearts
and nothing so blunt as the stave

what can this mean what I want and am and wish to be
I miss you so far away and too thoughtless to call

she said words that set me free
back when there was nothing but her and me and
painting our fingernails blue
motorvating through the empire
across burning streets
we wailed entire songs along with Trent or Tori
we knew everything except how much more we would know
and that we would eventually grow old

they made holes with words down the years
phrases without escape binding us this way
but we grew magically our bones
straightening into averages into these
forms which eyes slide past moving fast
remember we were chum for fearsome mouths but now
oh now
we fade into every crowd

I woke into this savage season
breaking ice beneath my feet
the trees made up of bones and joints

when we sank below the
surface
we dove like birds that would
never emerge
and how the fish resented
our disgusting
scaleless skins

when melancholy came to devour us
we hid behind the couch
and barely stifled laughter
she would turn it sour in our mouths
then the wind came blowing out
day and light
and we were laid
against the shadows
between the clouds
they were our shrouds

that day the wind's fury
broke
blowing us to the ground and
the tumbleweeds invaded
from the desert
rolling the sharp scent
of the rain with them

she cut the stars from the sky
and pasted them onto bookshelves
picture frames
key chains
forming collages of their burning endlessness
red blue yellow and black
and I came to her door to beg
them back
into the night
but she laughed saying "they're no more
yours than mine"
perhaps less even

he's the only one I knew
and back he came (and
up we grew) with a message
on the binary sea
(it was for me)

carnations grew wild there I found you
in a sunset of cold gold and fire
you read a letter in a sea of letters
and it spoke to you in my voice
it spoke our names with silence and
the opacity of computer screens
which screened us one from the other
sur le pont
and all the French I can throw in
all the poetry I can

I met a man and he knew
what I knew
he said Marinn I'll find you on the bridge
with the wind flowers
you in your coat the color
of Printemps
and I called to him
I called his name over
the walls and
broke it all

what's left behind to the right to the left
the devastation you left
as you moved offshore
and down the block
this girl with melting
wax wings
whose face you held
and burned palm prints
they bloom like chrysanthemums
and in the empty spaces where you'd
denned
the empty spaces also that you made
you were the earthquake and the gale
and the solar eclipse

when you're the girl with the
beautiful smart blues
the only Friday night
fights are between you and you
and whether to wait
to sleep
to write
or to sleep

the girl with the
beautiful smart blues
won't cry anymore
she opens the windows (and the door)
and the wind
is her best is her best
is her Sunday bright best
lover

the closest I will ever be to you
is a nude cartoon

and the day you told me
solemnly
that I had no reptilian alien husband
in Pomona (in Pomona)

because you touched me briefly
I think I burned your hand

but wondered why I lay fifteen feet (and
miles) away
when I should have weaved through
the dark
and demanded you allow me to sleep
in your arms

I did not
and I think I shall find it
always regrettable

the correspondence of molecules
they taught us in school
and the attraction of
north south from afar
I write you letters and expect
no answer

I find an end
down the street and into
light
I'm woven in
but there are words
I refuse
to give

this is the place
where ghosts tune up
their broken voices
and wail into the dark

I say this house is haunted
by murdered girls and angry
men come to bury them
you laugh and turn
I see all this when
I blink my eyes
like it's the last I'll ever
see of you

I pretend it doesn't hurt and toss myself across the bed
or I force myself to walk down the river path anything to
ignore the telephone
that refuses to ring

old women revolving fill my days
stupid movies about the passionate love I don't have
soak up hours in little blocks

but always there is the circling of my
thoughts like vultures
picking the promises I was
foolish enough to believe

I do remember August as the
sweetest month despite the heat
it warmed Tahoe to less than freezing
it warmed our skins and when we
met we melted one into the other
like the liason which makes French so
irresistibly beautiful
the wells of lust did not evaporate
contrary to the warnings you
tacked up over the doors
I wanted to smile into your smile
and breathe into your opened mouth
the air that would make us live
forever but you stopped me with
kisses with your tongue
I do remember August as the
sweetest month despite
the end and the harvest and the
moon cracking in two

The disorder was another avenue of order. She would rather be alone with her red-on-yellow skin and purple-cold fingernails. Perhaps she told herself for so long that she would rather be alone that it became true. She fabricated the belief. What she became was a simple matter of preference. But she would never admit it. (Even if she knew it.)

lazy quail run
"chicago chicago" they say
refusing to capitalize

I wanted you to find a way to love
disproportionately
what I wanted was your power in a
jar and
martyrdom didn't fit my style
though you say I made it look easy
I have a habit of only doing those
things at which I will succeed
like you and me
dragging each other around through the
laughable levels of hell

this is the consolation prize
unbreakable and flexible and
everything we couldn't be
while we were an us

the years you handed me quietly
signed over with a grin
I spent and failed to bank

detect the precise moment she gave up on poetry it wasn't going to save her anyway walking into that dark tunnel under the road this is the mouth and that is the throat of the leviathan she was scared and he put his hand on her back and spoke go forward girl it wants you now at least someone did she tasted grit and water and found an oasis up on the mountain facing North the wind blew back her hair and she surveyed the desolation he kissed her pink rosebud mouth and she sank below

you don't need bowling shoes but a girl with the blues the kind who thinks
the way you think you hate girls to think

if they didn't gnaw at you
you couldn't find anything to argue
no sweet Catch-22's
oh they make love and they break it
but it's the same sum
fetches up to around one

the darkness leaves me weak listening
to my own eyelids click open shut open again
two streets down the train whack-whacks and
woo-woos its way across Keystone
paralleling the river and the life and the silvery
blood of this city
I think of cinders and steam
coal and shovels
how ladies wore bustles and gloves
I'd wear gloves for you
if it would change anything
roll over and hope
soon my left arm will wake from its
numb spell
these thoughts and the crush of solitude
and my mind following the streets that lead
to your door

I knew the tang
of your killing jar
with words of silver spun
thin like sugar
it drinks me in it
drinks me in

how I lay cradled
by doom
and listen to the slow
beat (54 per minute)
of my own heart

does it mean I've died
I asked once
it means you will live
longer you said
and I cursed you as though
you made the rules
yourself

every solitary Monday alarmed by the insensitive beeping of my alarm clock sun appears and greets too cheery for this dark and dry air my smiles poor anemic lips not moving smoothly over teeth but when I read that message come hurling over spacetime it is precisely what I would want in a message come hurling over spacetime man you have got me pressed in glass and ready to sit to pass all your tests what could it mean to be your loved best oh but the feel of your mind I can slip into that and out again do you do the same in those hours alone just a screen and the blinking cursor

he admires the small things
purple prose and impressions from
grade-b horror films
cruising myspace for myriad sins
to compare his own against
he thinks in song lyrics
his nerves telegraphing
in rhythm
up to brainpan back to
muscles
spring quietly and
smooth into the crush of
hope
all these hopes I have
pinned upon your lapel

what would it mean if the poetry died I don't want to think this way but here it is when you want words and they don't form what could be worse what could be more foreign imagine the sudden inability to hear music or to see blue no not like that at all you act as though this is dying stuff this is just numbness and shock and disquietude I am afraid I am afraid and I feel strings stretching from me to him they are tightening in my belly I will cut each one mercy is not a word I know well
don't let me be weak I want to remember the way caring for someone hurts inside the ribcage he has no right to be distant I'll strike before it happens to me again to me again make poems out of it and lock it up in my book goodbye and then the sky is what I really meant

this should be easy this should be painless no guarantees but dark clouds forming on my lips I want to take a slip if it could be easy like when we believed in love like when we believed in souls
these days we make little piles of excuses and festoons of responsibility stupid duties performed for consistency's sake
you make me want to take it all out erase the words I've written and replace them
with keys and messages and the sounds you stopped me from making
I need to turn away I know I need to turn away
before it gets too good to let it go

show me sunlight and the
balance of things left
unsaid

I have stolen a man
but never a thing of value
I roll up the bamboo blind

-- Suzuki Masajo

I look for the tragedy of your
understanding
it means nothing without the answer
key
and down through the mirrors
we parallel

you're my shadow and for this we
have exchanged loyalty and short
words and many many meanings
varied like the strands of
your hair

you make me want to keep
my eyes open even as they burn
and then again close them
because the world could
fade

touch me and I'll know you're
here
I say good-bye but
it just sounds like a
promise of something
greater

the unraveling of your odd beauty
happened against the moon
one night maybe two
you shrugged off the mantle
and waded into the water
so long your bones had been hidden
in pale fat your eyes gone
dark and there was really nothing to say
for them
lips too thin and breasts too low
beyond reason your insistence that you
were made differently

woman how I wanted it to be true and
wanted your triumph on
these battlefields
I had wagered everything
everything
on the outcome

you made more years than I'd any
right to hope
the ripple of your flesh
and the burning of your heart

no one could blame what followed
(it always follows each)
to be born and
survive feasting on comfort because
love was carved for better creatures
(things that shimmered away from you
and I)

I want to lay a gleaming jewel
down with you
and to know if the burden of your mind
has lifted
and if you still know
pain there in
that place you have gone without
me

exposed to fraud the
word means nothing
when you say it
eligible bachelors dog
maulings
this is the news and the
world feeds us with small spoons

don't be sick with this ritual
poison you don't need it
you say you do
we have all been fooled
for too many years
I think you should kill the
television and free
yourself from
its tethers

after you died I started collecting pictures all sepia and grey and the color of your eyes lost to time and memory I keep a framed photograph of you at twelve or thirteen years old

I'd like to make a time machine and find you and seduce you into my bed out of those overalls you are wearing and kissing up your neck I know how wrong it is and yet it is a little dream of mine

let me have my dreams they're the only thing that wasn't stolen and sold for a fix or two

your grief is a halo
and your mouth is
the fountain
I would sit near
and be cooled
you tell me
"I can't I won't
I could never
be where you are"
and it frightens me
to see your
choices clear as your
tears

(does it matter that
I believe you can)

you are mourning something
long-gone your rage
building houses out of sticks
and razing them
you can't stop these things
you can't see the future

(I think you could)

Oh scorpio I knew
that burning but
never the love
of that pain
the scald of
the skin
until I knew you
how to die in your flames
is one thousand
times
sweeter than to
live in any
sea
Scorpi-
oh consume me
and everything
until it
lies in ruins around our
bodies flexing
toward each other
and pulling me
close close closer
I want to be there
in your fire

to every word I speak there is a
certain sadness
you say it comes from the
quiet of my voice and
cast of my eyes
always lost and hollow
you want to know what I
think when I go
far away
what I am contemplating
during these hypnotic
episodes

I am thinking about bus stations
and the hopelessness the
reek of body odor
and fear and
desperation and where
one more meal will be coming
from
I am thinking about the person
I was close to being
on either side of the line that
equals me now
how good and how bad
could I have been
what spaces I could make
in the deep water and what holes
I can fill here in the
sand

I am contemplating the
existence of cats
and music and grass and cultivated
hothouse tomatoes
and you
all things exquisite and
lovelier than my
eyes and hands and mouth
deserve

but to you I say that I
don't recall
that it was just nonsense
that it was just me being the
girl I am
and you chuckle at your
silly-headed little
poet