“21”

Hey, wolf.

Last night, the Uber driver was an old man wearing tie-dye,

just in case you were wondering.

His name was Tom. One of my friends knew his son. He’s a boy scout.

I remembered these small details ‘cause I knew you’d ask about them,

but no, I didn’t see what kind of car he drove –

how sober do you think I was?

Hey, wolf, just in case you were wondering:

I don’t owe you an explanation for anything.

I sent you that text as a courtesy because

you told me not to come home and I figured

even though you’d locked the door on me, you’d still

want to know I wasn’t dead in a ditch.

It’s red-pill-blue-pill with you, and they’re both poison.

Hey wolf, just in case you were wondering

why I drive an hour and come and see you

for only half the day and then leave,

it’s because the Nut House isn’t exactly a prime vacation spot;

it’s because my existence is a timeshare you’ve been squatting in

for twenty-one years and I’d really like my turn, hey wolf,

it’s because when we’re laughing on the phone, I feel safe,

it makes me think maybe, and then we’re driving to the grocery store

and you ask me why the car smells like cigarettes. You ask me

even though you know I quit.

Hey, wolf, I’d explain how hard this is, but you won’t listen.

Hey, wolf, are you choking on that wool yet?

 

I’m moving to Oregon so when I pull up to the Shell station,

I won’t wonder whether the person pumping my gas

is plotting to blow me up.

One time my neighbor asked why I give you this power, and I said

I don’t give you anything—you buy the matches.

Only you can prevent wildfires.

 

Hey, wolf, just in case you forgot,

I didn’t ask to be put on this earth, no,

I’m trying to make do with what I’ve been dealt,

so why the fuck do you keep pushing me away?

I’ll tell you something you’re not gonna like.

As I’ve been clinging to this wind-warped raft,

marooned on the cesspool sea of your rage,

barely keeping my chin above the waves,

these waves that feel like they keep getting bigger because

your hot air is melting the ice caps of my joy,

the water’s been working on my sandstone heart,

chipping and smoothing and rounding this hate

into a pearl, a pearl that I’ll cough up

once I drift back to land, perfect polished diamond of soul,

I’ll admire it

over your fucking coffin, wolf,

because you always take credit for the things that I make – hey,

just in case you were wondering?

This one’s mine.

Ekphrasis: “Desert”

A danseus, tilted:

the final silent, crooked ballet

yawning over sand and stone,

a single petrified leg –

precarious –

twitching in the heat-wave wind.

Inhale.

Sloped calves, tight core, and one toe tipped

toward the spattered sky,

Hold.

The slender fingers shudder,

grasping

for one feeble, fatal sigh of air

creaking through the splintered bones,

crumbled to dust on the earthen stage.

Exhale.

And the course hand of the desert extends,

cups

her purple face in his palm, draws her

down upon the scorched ground,

and kisses her,

caressing her twisted, slumbering form,

agave woven into the brittle hair.

And she dreams silent desert dreams,

dancing,

dancing to dust in the heat-wave wind.

 

Paroxysm in Free Verse

He says that I write poems

like a goddamn epileptic:

words senses images thoughts

spasmodic against the blinding page.

And while it is true that I have a knack for blurring

the razored contrast of the truth,

there is something to be said for the seizure of the soul,

for a feeling does not feel unless it burns beneath the skin.

Besides: some memories are too sharp to wrap in tidy packaging;

my teeth shatter against the words, and suddenly

the moment is like the floor on Christmas morning:

a gift nested in shreds of pretty paper.

The poems aren’t real unless I tear the facts apart—

unless I shiver and shake and forget and distort.

Sometimes when I recall what was said, or what it meant,

or why, time stops

and twists,

and I cannot help it.

He says that I am bad at remembering,

but I am simply wont to listen

to the humming of my honest bones,

the grapes gossiping in my head,

the bees stinging my fingertips,

the waves crashing in my heart.

Therein lies a different truth, more true

than what my eyes have seen, or what my ears have heard,

and I am impossibly fascinated with

the turbulent, tangible world.

I am a poet, not a historian;

everything I’ve ever written may very well be false.

He reads each line and says I am a liar,

but I do it for art’s sake.

Poem: “Sandgirl”

Dwelling among dunes,

The sediment sifts through your fingers, and you dig

for purpose.

Lightning

strikes,

and she melts warmly

into your arms,

from granules to glass.

Gaze into

and through her;

her skin is still electrified, and yet,

despite the sting, hers

are the softest lips you’ve ever kissed, you want

to shatter her,

and swallow the shards,

and bleed,

and be free, it’s

the first time you’ve ever felt it this way,

and God, oh thank God—

Oh, but was it Heaven who brought down the mountains

and stirred the sky,

to burn the sand,

to create her?

Or was it, buried

deep inside your know-no-better heart

just another machination

of Hell?

Poem: “Pest”

Tireless insect,

beating with tattered wings beat with a song

of dust and death:

what strange ritual,

a lustful citronella dance,

circles encircling

the sallow attic bulb,

spiraling towards entropy.

 

What is

the terminal velocity of madness?

 

Speak only when you pity it.

Stroke the exoskeleton with razorblade hands—

don’t tease it, provoke it—

Pierce its heart,

and assemble the pieces into something new,

Have mercy,

 

Mercy on this moth—

(zap.)

Poem: “A Note on the Kitchen Fridge”

Remember,
When you are
A dry, December wind, frigid,
Remember:
The pressure of your lips on this white ceramic
Remember:
How your sleepy scent entwines with the
Whorls of steam from this latte
Remember:
The whispering spirit inside of you,
How your atoms
Are one with all and everything
Remember:
The heavens gave you a voice so for the love of Nature, use it
To remember:
When the trees bend low and fan their branches out before you,
Blossomed hands of ceremony,
Welcome child of spring
Remember:
The sweet scent of sap and freedom
(Room to grow)
Remember:
As you climb the blessed boughs to the sky,
As the stars call your body home,
A bursting celestial serenade,
Remember:
When you were ashes, when you
Were dust
Remember the winged flurry of your lashes
Imagination yearning to taking flight through
Gleaming blue seaglass eyes
Remember:
The softest kiss
The cleanest breeze
Remember the resilience of your incessant passionate heart
And how desperate, how grateful
The universe is to see you
Alive.

Poem: “Utterfly”

I was an utterfly,

my wings dense matter,

colorless for they were every color at once.

I was the universe in the palm of your hand,

Too heavy.

And I sank, fluttering, into the gallows of your hollow stomach –

Was I too much to swallow?

How it tasted going down:

the flavor of incomprehensibility;

you could not take me, tame me.

And I burst from between your ribs,

turned you inside out –

An utterfly

is the sheer vastness of all things:

Knowledge – and the lack of it –

a reminder to learn so you can learn

to forget.

Because why should you remember the definite shape

of infinity?

The People Poem (Self/I/We/Others/He/She/Them)

“Self” is

The canvas

Clay

“I,”

The product

of mutation, a

Reflection

Of what you want,

It is

Whatever’s left after you

Tinker with

My self.

A blank page

With color added.

“We.”

It is a cluster

Conglomeration a

Group

Unity?

No such thing.

We’re all pigs

Floundering in the

Mire but

We’re not in this together, we

Don’t even like one another.

“Others.”

Division.

“He.”

“She.”

Distinct and different

We split ourselves

Like atoms

And what results

Is armageddon

What color is the self, exactly?

Slave brown?

Army green?

Combat-boots-black how about

Thirty-women-and-children-dead red?

Bruised blue, they’re ugly

The colors we paint people

And when we realize

That fact, when we see

How we’ve mutilated this world we

Create another entity,

The scapegoat,

To cover it up

And we call it

“Them.”

Prose: “The Other Colors”

As I lurch down the path, everything is rust-red.

Red, and yellow-green and grey-brown, the color of dead and dying things. Dull, muted as the winter air crystalizes in my lungs and the grass shrivels to a crisp frozen stubble. The buildings around me are brown, made of chipped brick and copper.

Walk fast, I tell myself. Live fast. Die young. I have places to be and people to see. But the people flash past in a blur, black streaks of smoky shadow stretching across the path, this path that I follow like a robot polished to a silvery sheen. This path that is landscaped in the colors that the system wants me to see, that I’ve been programmed to see. Rust-red. Yellow-green. Grey-brown. My vision is not mine. Maybe that’s why it all seems lackluster.

What of the other colors?

The thought is pale yellow like a distant star, the shimmering pastel hue of hope and wonder. One of these days I should lift my head and notice them, really see them: the other colors. The colors that I have always been taught were meaningless, the colors that serve no one. White: the cotton ball clouds drifting through the atmosphere. Pink: the blazing sun if I stare too long. Blue: the sky, a fragile shade, like a freshly laid robin’s egg. White pink blue, all of them meaningless, pointless to think about. Why bother? The sky is for birds, who fly because their lives have no aim, whose brains are too small to comprehend the arbitrariness of it all. They don’t realize that the sky has nothing to offer them. Man knows better than to immerse himself in such emptiness. It is futile to dream, they tell me, to seek one’s destiny anywhere other than in what is given, what unfolds beneath me as I tread the red path.

Red: the color of willful ignorance.

Everything I’ve been told is wrong. If the sky is meaningless, then why is there a crayon my box that is the same precise shade of baby blue? There is substance, something to discover in it all. Why else would it exist?

Here is something else with substance: man. Man, who is brown and tan and ash-black and beige, who has created this world and unearthed the shades of it, this world that is an oyster, craggy and dark at first glance but rippled with opalescent iridescence inside. Man is a diamond revolving in the sun, shooting off beams of dazzling light, fractals of violet and magenta and crimson and gold and lime, and these—

—these colors often go unnoticed, because we have been trained to ignore them, trained that the only colors that matter are the colors of success. The system raises us colorblind.

But I am not. I am not a red path, or a patch of dead yellow grass and brick buildings. There is a whole other world surrounding me, a world of pink and white and blue and perhaps others, I can feel it. So I will go, valiantly, into the sky, into the futile yonder, where it waits. Or maybe there really is nothing to be found there, out in the world. It may be. But at least I will have, if I try…

…the other colors.

Poem: “Fonts”