Belly Hums

I am grateful for the pictures flashing

between my ears when hearing what

plucks my gut strings.

.

i don’t have a lot of the strong or smart

or shrewd but maybe some part of

the good, I hope.

Your Elation is in Direct Opposition to Idolatry.

the nuclear family is about to explode

and splatter bloody chunks all over

the minivan, which I hope explodes as well

because that would be badass.

we as molecules will multiply out from

and onto each other without restraint,

cracking jokes about subatomic schisms

and waking up cradled by our friends’ forearms

and backs.  we will live slap-happily together

and save fossil fuels, because dead dinosaurs

are real pissed off about

gettin’ milked all the time.

.

our cats and dogs will sleep

in the trees and vines, hunting

with us in calico war paint mirroring

streaks of earthy joy running

down our chests and backs, parallel

columns of priceless sinew purring

hammock sighs in August darkness.

.

we will dump spare change

into the streets and hand out bagels

for free, we will fist bump grandmothers

and play air guitar in the frozen food

aisle, we will sprint down stairs into

each other colliding with a sound

like strings and bells and choirs

proclaiming the anniversary of

a new beginning.

Between the Risks

your six-string pickings are familiar like little red wagons

and white gravel drives or pedaling past barn skeletons

to Shirley’s grave in summer, self-taught on the few days left

to be young.

.

at fifteen I asked the nighttime forest to adopt me

into a broken clock religion of firefly rites

and boundless chapels housing windows shining

across midnight ceilings.  I was baptized

by the high sweet voices you gave me

and crucified the glaze on my eyes,

throat ringing harmony.

.

for years I could only love the things you loved

without hesitance, my heart was your heart

and it walked around outside me, burning

and humming strains of genius.

.

if there’s only room for one song when my

synapses are misfiring finally,

I want it to be yours:

.

d  a  b  g d

f#  g  a  d

c  d  g  b  d  g

a

Jenny, as a Muse

he spends most of his time

in the adjacent room,

piddling away at places that don’t exist.

.

psalms sing from his heart as blood flows

to his groin, hearing nightingales, hallelujah

hallelujah hallelujah

.

yellowed limbs groan now I shall live

as the letters jumble and walls crumble in on their own

underwhelming weight.

.

have mercy.

Great Fuckin’ Job, Jenny. – anonymous

now I gotta compete with a desk

stead a makin love on it, what with

all that magicky shit he got goin on

upstairs.

.

go warble yerself to death somewhere else.

Coagulate Trust

our darling doe eyes and receding hairlines

are built on twisted ladder halves of complementary

acidic elegance, skulls sparking hot thoughts compartmentally

like God-wrought charging elephants stampeding

twenty-four triumphant feet crushing dry grass

with soft flesh under a noontide flash

of a hot, wet, center-set

self-destructible sun.

.

we run on dark-spotted blood and it shows.

I Don’t Know About You, But Pants.

I am dumber than a sack of rocks.

I don’t even know what rocks are

or why the hell they are in sacks.

I just forgot what a sack is.

If someone can tell me what

“sack” is, I will give them an

unspecified amount of money

because counting is hard and

pisses me off.  Due to hearing

the phrase “pissed off” many times

in conversation, I have come to believe

that urinating is a socially acceptable

manner of expressing anger and piss

all over myself whenever I am

pissed off.  Thankfully, I am rarely angry

because it is hard for me to think and

subsequently form views about

which to become pissed off – also,

I have many pairs of pants.

Thanks To Latvian Pepsi, I Am A New Person.

– it’s like all my organs are floating on a lake, sending signals to each other with flags and lights.  they’re asking for help.

– i don’t understand.

– have you ever seen a belly dancer?  not a stripper, a belly dancer.

– at the Moroccan place in Highsdale.

– okay, think about her – a woman, right? – think about her arms looking like snakes.  her arms look like snakes.

– her arms look like fishtails.

– her arms look like fishtails.  she rolls her muscles, firm and flowing then flicking out her fingertips, whipping energy into the air.  it hangs suspended, still, before the next undulation – it’s like that happening every second in my mind.

– is it arousing?

– kind of – no, I mean, yes.  yes it is.  it pulls me in and sighs down my neck.

– yes?

– i see a tree stump in a clearing and after dark i go there and sit.  if a man enters the clearing i want to take as my husband, we marry that night with our bodies.  we perform a ceremony later to acknowledge what’s been enacted between us by God and the forest.

– that’s a lovely thing.

– thoughts are lovely things.

– we should make more of them, all the time.

– i agree, but it’s risky.  they’re like children, a beautiful five-year-old daughter you dress up in tutus and film home videos of with your spouse, laughing involuntarily because you are young and happy.  you love her more than anything or anyone in the world.  then one day someone kidnaps her and you call the police and your relatives bring casseroles over while K-9 units scour for her smell in stripper pits.  they find her half-decomposed in a garbage bag under the bridge.  when you go to identify her there are fluorescent lights, serrated knives made of photons slicing and reflecting off her remaining eyeball, a glassy spider egg about to hatch next to a bare skull, face eaten clean away by worms and mice.  you can’t be the same at all, after that.  you’re barely human and don’t have a say, it’s just the “hello i am a person” nametag balled up and tossed on the fire.

– but couldn’t that make you more a person too?  the weight of loss.  the most human-like people I’ve met are the ones carrying boulders in their stomachs.  mountains, even.

– true.  we are made of dirt.

– and air.

– and water.  lots of it.

– someone once told me that thoughts are like water and if you can’t dance around the flow, get the hell outta dodge.

– they sound wise.

– i like that you are here.

– i like that I am here and you are here too at the same time.

– “together” is a good word.

– yes.

– genesis has something goin’ with that “and God saw that it was good.”  i don’t buy any of that young earth shit.  i don’t think that’s what whoever wrote it was gettin’ at,  but the “it was good” – that is something.  that things like water and light and birds and trees are there is good, that’s – that’s lovely or elegant or something, i don’t know

– i understand.  i do

– you are, and that is good.

– that came before anything else.

– yes. don’t let us forget that.

– let’s remember as many good things as possible.

– okay.

– (..)

– (….)

Oh Fuck Oh Fuck Oh Fuck: Scarecrow Collateral, One Two Three

it’s like running too fast and being too tall at the same time then seeing yourself  collide with telephone wires and cut off your own head except it’s not your own head it’s somebody else’s head and you’re screaming because they’re bleeding and they look surprised not because they’re actually surprised but they were surprised ten seconds ago when their head was still attached to their neck and you’re screaming oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck and crying more than you have since first grade at your great-grandmother’s funeral because it was scary not black bat and witches scary but pink wallpaper and boring organ music scary, the scary that tries to hide itself behind nice things and becomes scarier by veiling its-

-elf in flowers and velvet oh god please stop you are terrifying me with your quiet Central Park stroll toward death maggots roasting your eyeballs for kabobs, my cynicism and sincerity have been switching nametags to fuzz clarity for laughs well HA HA HA here they come spitting “we ain’t got time for mental glitches bitches let’s get down to business” then forget Fibonacci leaves & leave out obvious non habeas corpus in accidental oversight of Origens and remove hats in shame to countless straw women losing husbands to canons fired in the wrong dir-

-ection if I’m slightly insane and don’t believe it when you schedule all my friends to sit stiff on the living room couch for intervention in nice outfits to break it to me gently I present you proudly with the perfect evidence to use against me.