8/30

When you love a Tomato, the produce section becomes more exciting

Roma's skin isn't as firm as it used to be, the soft red I once knew is now wrinkled, brown and bruised. She seems to sense my trouble with her taste, the newfound foulness of her oozing juices. She lies in the crisper sleeping, dreaming simple vine dreams.

With a fresh garden of stuble and an overripe gut, the market is a gallery called "Things you can't have." I stare at Roma's ripe relatives, the sweet yellow of her curious cousins. I gawk at the cherries and their meager frames, wonder how much of my weight they could handle, how long it will take to notice me staring. Even crispy Videllia is looking better, and if I could only wash away her soupy stink or grow 10 years younger, I would peel away her crumbling yellow clothing and indulge in the sweetness of her layers.

6/30 and 7/30

6/30

may fix spacing later


a few requests, in order of entering my mind


I want to hold my baptism
in the heavy atmosphere
that lays herself down
and deadly before
the first ovation
of thunderstorms
I want the world to stop
spinning for just one
goddamn (single)
motherfucking (oh please oh please)
SECOND but
mother nature dont care what
I want. there are dangerous
streetlamps in this city
that stop you like spot lights
or spot you like stop light and all
I want is to know the difference
between houses and homes
realty and reality
relatives and relativity my
eye wants closure
like no lid can give, scared
of scars or anything carved
into a point
I want to make interstate love
seem silent let the big trucks sleep
all night and just leave
your face in my extra empty
pillow space thats all
I want from the whole american race.


7/30

Cyber PUNK

In the long lobby mirrors, metallic and shiny like new eyes, her plastic pink raincoat is lucid. She stands square waisted, the white cotton painters pants curve to frame her hip and leg. A brain bucket in her left hand and the distant whimpers of bikes out her left ear. She pops a derm to her skin, and inhales all the dust of the world. Exhales a prism.

Behind the over-large black of her glasses her cowboy buzzes in her mind, swims in the liquid of the matrix, blind in the myriad faces of orange-yellow light. She don't ride console no more. She did hard time for hanging paper in the back of an old bodega, another time for breaking a blue boy's back, she lit up some kids with her fresh fletcher like subway lights, every one of em flatlined.

But here, her silver eyes trace a couple rent-a-cops, hired muscled that ain't gonna push as strong as I am, she says. A few seconds before the count goes off, before her cowboy coos in her ears and tells her where to make the drop. Don't let me down, Catmother. She fingers the flesh colored tape in the ridges of her chest that hold the bugs in place and names everything she knows.

Eel is the fence. Paintboys don't talk. She don't work for hotdogs. And right now she's his input and he's her cowboy.

5/30

this is something i've been working on for a while. no verbs.


first time

The crickets shuddering secrets and the weight of every summer, with a voice a harsh whisper like a kicked and broken dog. And her dry throat, the only remains of the havoc of stale pollen off withered grass.

Under a sharp summer sky all dewy damp and too few stars. Her heaving pale cotton wraped body in an unruffled dress on the hood of a red chevy. And hard horny thighs and patient playing fingers.

She and the long tunnel of the moon, the distant cities of stars. Unsatisfied fingers and a ruffled white dress, but no whimper no moan.

4/30

The Truth About our History (since 2007)

It's not fair for me
to keep writing poems
to you
or at you
or about you.

you have your handsome
helpful husband
and a plane ticket
to russia
i have empty
hands
and pockets
and pages.

3/30

Slick Roads

hes skittish like a spider
feeling faint floor tremors
when the rain falls
across his windshield
and the big trucks
sneak by on
18 wheels

2/30

drunk at a party, prose poem

I talk to a girl for twenty minutes but I don't know what she says. My brain drifts around a lot, past all the other girls in the room. I try and hold eye contact, try not to check out her body, but my reaction times are slowed, and I can't estimate how long my looks linger.

We say a lot of stuff like, "yeah I know," "I totally agree" "I feel the same way" and I'm not sure how much of it we mean.

I stand on the crowded porch, sheltered from the pelting rain, smoking a cigarette and breathing over the low roar of the people. I don't know what happened to that girl, or even remember her name. All I can see is a little star right at the tip of my nose, and all I know is just the very edge of a need to cough.

And even though I'm very wet, I can't feel a single drop of rain.

1/30

she signed
'may your inner cowboy
frequent plenty of midnight executions,
saloons, cigarettes, and prostitutes'
on the last page of the country
music book she bought me.

There were so many whiskey
and cigarette deaths
on those lonesome pages
and she knew how much I hated
that those same things weren't killing me.

Thinkin bout train
songs and downtown little rock
still the same
hard luck cowboy
that only grew up
a little.



a kind of decent first attempt. it's mostly true.