milquetoast

that's me
 in the corner, by the stairs

counting how many moons are in
over and over
over and over till i can be drunk enough
to go and talk a little with you

maybe say "bruise me sweet, but i must say you're the most beautiful girl i've ever seen" (well, in the last hour and five.)
 and then she is a kitten or a knife and i hold her
 clever, almost with the same care her mother
 wore her year after

by the cradle with the interlocking fingers and singing a song about blackbirds.

"hey, i'm whatever, whatever whatever and whatnot, who do you know here?"

i'm like: "david sorrows", with my mouth quirked and my eyes drift by the curtains with their alabaster skin, and slight flutter, "over there by the curtains with the dwarf".

there was no dwarf, i didn't know that guy either.

somewhere the music lurched into 80's suicide.

she "loved this song"

and i left without fucking her.

my phone was black screen and the street lamps spun my reflection. the night veered into masturbation.

bleak again

soon or later i will be tree roots or
fire.

a section from the window, and the escarpment beckons, two hands by the sure hope of heat
salted by suffering as to preserve

my dignity, my quiet ire. it's the crash i hear, when my dead sons and mother and her old ways and chatter
ghost me by the grate where licks of flame spark.

whose memory did i lie to? the wood panelled picture frame with the child i use to be. the wolfed down accent of someone older, their cracked sympathy and faultless love. a living room with a whip and i don't know where that went, away with the baked towels perhaps.

but the only sons i have are the ones i use to be when i smiled and fell through windows or threw dirt, scraped knees and hit bricks, blood streaming from the mess of cousins, a silk tangle between lies and frozen peas, but i didn't cry. i didn't rat either.

baked towels are the best memory, like my skin remembers them even though it stretched and maybe ate up my younger self- devoured. my skeleton stands taller, more able, so easily crushed by gravity.

though that's the crux of it: the labyrinth and the suffering; how to revolt from new teeth and shining eyes, bottle pain and muddle lips against other lips when words are useless little silences we use to forget how to feel. to trust.

to otherwise be a child and leave my hands to yours and know that you will hold them from tomorrow when i will be gone older, thirsting for the thing i cradled once.

or never have i breathed, wanted, loved.

under lava

if she were a cassette and i was a winding finger i would 

be reversing her back to the long and short of ire; you know, ire: 

its like love but less daft, its the shadow of a laugh and the long wince 

from long left flirtations. wench i know your name, it pulses 

beside my head when i think i see my phone blink.  ire is like that. 

say you hate me, see me man myself in wrinkles and crawl into one of them 

and squeeze my pain like a glass jar.  say that's true, maybe i fiddle to the honey bee, 

maybe curtains sting as i put away the sun ....

 

if she were a cassette she would be in the garage in a box or at the dumpster under 

a bunch of lava lamps. 

ebullient

her hair is remiss, it should be glad if i should see it, love it, or
cold cock it.

and if her hair was her heart it would be beating as if it were one length
of silk from being entombed. all along the road twirling by the yellow poplars
and smelling the salt from the ocean.

and if her hair was here, well, i would be smiling more and maybe more than that.

I am the king!

-or not!

the style of king, now thinking
but man shaped, full well
fatling

now prattling. erstwhile tense, over; 
i will use a semi-colon in the poem; 
you couldn't see me yesterday and now you 
exist, as if i exit 

the shop, the windows with their baneful glare, 
the shrewd of me knows to slink out, to bow, 
to somewhat only love you through haunting. 

as though the choice was mine, and i am handheld
to my suffering, its three fingers and gawping mouth, 
and the sound of that beating wild inside me
as if i once heard lake and swan dance and that 
was the new shadow of us. something trudged up- 
a chorus of water, and the crisp repeat, 
the 5 second beat. 

"as though the choice was mine". as if i wrote that honest. 

i am the king! the king damn it! 

my chains clack, melee 
with the grass

what is known is heart, far gone,  
 drip-dried

it is dew on chains, rust then, or grass led
to the dirt where her hands dig, (dug)

where i see her bones and mine. 
for the king who loves

he cradled me in his mouth and was silent for most of it.
her ground is somewhere north of mine

in fields of grass with the tallest tree i climb and see 
little images of her sprawled in text and something phoneme
exists there, sure. like i would trap her in language, 
in me, in me! 

as if sex were important 
or romantic, 

or like christmas comes and goes and all the stale cookies in the world 
couldn't fill me up. 

but i am the king! 

and my tears are strange, and longing. 

chicken is a bird, 
  i guess my clucking 

...
well held back 
i crown 

  and she is the lost head. 
  see the glint 
  smash to the floor! 
  its price of plastic  
  i pay for 
  word by
  worm. 

and where is the apple again? 
where is the gold of her hair? 


*
i have ribs today, toying with
my heart. ha

i am the king!
the foppish fool.

my heart is the crown that knows it.

*
lol. :p

*

one year ago:

  you walked into a song and became it.
  and i sing it under my breath,
  just because i love you

which would be enough.

but i am the king!

see:
it isn't.

this bleak

is when eyes criss-cross the stars 

rather heart.

golden lamb breathe, the image 

i sieve that midas linger, that 

brood of his, that thistle on the dams edge

it spoke of this 

needling at her legs like the words 

fell from his tongue and crawled over

stone, i think i saw her  

over by the bridge

a gate by it. 

i went to speak, to say hello, 

nothing brash

the sky was closing over me, and 

a flood of crows swept my vision

to see rabbit to see hawk

and the idle crunch

as i lay myself before a gate

maybe the wind will shift it, 

maybe tomorrow when the birds 

are still, or the field is cut to pieces.

bill and sally go to the stars

they find rainbow, they free
judas, they hold hands

it could be love, the shine - the syllable to make lips
move like treasure chests and the pry bar so rusted
that when you slammed the car boot it flaked on the
side of the grass which i had just cleaned of her
blood.

and she was everything: so fatal,
sounds of love, forlorn as bee wings
dripping honey into thought, i spread 
my legs for you
(she thinks) but i thinkits that tender thing again, that she
knows seed is the link and the flame.

or that was blood mouthed- when he was cradled in his early life, swaddled by the lamp and the shadows
of flowers cut pretty and placed on a dresser by the mirror that she will never love, or be kind.

once we danced, spittle on my jaw, i called her mommy or sock puppet, i made a pose which she threw up on, i was jade beneath the well lip, the burlesque of ripped flesh and crushed peanuts

the rainbow soggy, my mind limping; fly-blown
and under sweat; your heart was my heart, and we have disease

we have trees which we watch grow in the evening

we have sally and bill

mouths open to the stars

and the tender hand

fisting each of them.

Orient

At the bar
Playing poker like a red bird
Sinking blue

I've read this scene before
Like Christmases and the wrapping rips
But the thing is just a thing
And I, blue River

Drown mutely.  Murdered by thoughts of you.

squeeze

when i look at your round bottom i get
i get

my milkshake brings all

i get
serious

i
get
smart

our bedroom smile  our bedroom smile
-it's worth repeating-
i want us to rent a memory i have
of cushions and stacking them.

of your eyes and the stillness as i looked into them
i could
blaze into your head
i would, two

of us
and me getting hard or conflicted
and i like that part of you

when you cried and i didn't know what to
i dont
i still dont


but this is last year, and now i need to be alive
  i like other things too
but right now i just want a hug and a squeeze.

k. smith, ok?

#happy birthday

  you're an electric
  something or rather
 
   a mathematics master
    or rather: a master

      o hearts, farts,
       o living chicken

you have clucked another
plucked a cow of milk

don't know what cray cray shit kentucky chicks do on in their garden patches. asnwer the tele. laugh and rub me in blood-jelly, coors coors, smoors on the lamplight your eyes dripping crows

like you slit the mud and crawled to california. i want you. nah. i want to write a better poem for you: CBF.
lol. lulz on your face.

i want to play your sister in a dream like i am your gameboy and you braid my hair and maybe stab me with hepatitis needle.  (that's how fucked up you are :)----

...but for reals i hope the moon is friendly, and that the ones who love you love you. that you wear a seatbelt on your horse, and that you have mittens on in the winter, fahr water in your heart.

dear gurl

i hope that you dont hate me.

a new poem to let you see i am broken and stuff (1-5-14)

one dead frolic in terms stood by-

those lilted arms of april, those trigger
finger march sonnets, like frank beans
my days counted up and swooshed

they pounded the dirt like a wedge
on the 15th, blazed skyward like balloons
and laughed at me like the internet.

one month ago i was masturbating to thoughts
of death now i am covered in a trillion sacrifices
like pollock backfired on my bellybutton

and that was disgusting to write and probably not true.
but fuck love.

i also wish it was may, every other month should just be may,

with the eagle on the pot, my jet sky iris by the gilded lullaby and with the heart my intent has thudded,
i can hear my veins sing in my ear,

till i am reading this back and every word comes at me like a jackhammer, and then i remember that there was a girl once who lived inside my head
and i think i should make her backpay me rent

because it would be nice.

send the sky to your mum over east

huddled rocks, west 

of wherever

the sun hits high, lyndon jnr with overalls on 

and squashed knuckles, the hair on his head like 

festering mice, or like the guy in that commercial 

about cheap stuff, 

L j is saying how the stars fit the flag too even 

to be real, like if they were in that blue ocean 

it would boil white, red, whatever. that many stars, he says, 

any ocean would be boiled death. 

i am sitting and nodding and drinking ice tea, 

and the sun is hot today, 

so i am not really thinking about stars, 

but how the sky should fuck off. 

when i look at girls in a bar

canticle for you would go something like:

i i i i i i i  

or thermos of you would come out cool, lit
and slither, i am a snake- you say,

but the way the bent branch
ends your vertebrae like i was capital letters
on a page somehow you inserted me formal,
a terrible "Mr", a "dear" that i never received
or
you misspelled with your tongue and i was the roadkill
you eyed as you passed the mile-marker,

sure i am alive, naked as gravel, not thin and
skin tight, you know like shaved meat
where you can almost see my ribs and little kidneys,
  my other okay organs too.

i say you looked beautiful
like stilettos look beautiful sometimes
or the right foot is quite like the left
and my tongue was so heavy in my head
i should have left it in my mouth
or maybe swallowed to one thousand.

i shouldn't have said it, never again,
now it's like i am the old shoe
with new laces, re:
the last of my kind, the endangered

i should be on some kind of charitable pension
where i can't be looked at,
its with my eyes where the trouble starts.

i cry more than i smile
 abandoned to heart
a balsa wood ship

crepuscular
  the rings of a tree
i am sawn through the middle
 i am another line
 you cant connect with these words
 that don't gather and dance
  me under starlight,
 faulted. don't picture me merry
 or upon the knee of your good looks
 gaping
 so far beyond, a vision
 with you
  beneath golden leaves
 and me
 leaning into

the only reason to go to america is to see what doritos taste like

but the sharks back is a rough ride
and i would forget my cowboy pants

my dinky-wink would be lonely tucked in my belly
eskimo style, don't think it likes cool ranch

maybe twirly mustache music like dad plays when evil
and fist bumping socks

i think 'merica is too cold in february
and lady liberty is huddled behind the dumpster
with dim sum in her eyes and lettuce in her
armpit.

i think in dustbowl country, or oil lake whatever
theirs an abused poem writer who likes
nachos and uses doritos or doesn't because the flavours
are confused and the additives made her hair go red

yeah, snack abused poem writer from the dustbowl country
who peed in the ocean so it would be warm enough for me
to swim and i did

and i came to america!


but i ended up in mexico and when i asked to try some doritos
they laughed at me


and i cried.

yet

Love i
In thoughts skewed by by reason
Before the footprint the thing to walk
.obscure. though heart is one
Beyond subtraction it with various incarnations slights through then through is not enough nor trousers well sown to skin I naked naked naked. Embrace the stench of love not its ever angled dildo. Its sleek angel of buzzing tumoirs and iridescence.

slit or shine

i was tense with my philip grin
that slinks out every now and
then:
  got head, like torque
  like a throat twisting my junk
  like a
  limpness that wheels itself
  to the garbage can
  more so that sans self
  or soloing a dirty sanchez
  i am sick
  sick sic
that yllow

its the ground i alert for, my throat
is the canvas and your heart is the glass paint
the horse piss; the radicchio wit; the end
of this...

i am so cut, so unscrewed
so
almost bounty clad
in a ribbon, furred for the hunter
and the
slickness of
it, you know:

a wet hole where love lies and where 23 minutes went searching
for it.

stick a fishhook in my mouth and gutter me

shift my body to the upper-case
SLIT ME.

for me

the world hurts too much to be wearing pants
o
world, downcast, o
forlorn beatrice, i called you shylock
slight me for it
in a thousand graces
by the blankets
alms of cool air
over toes

the government. though saying truth
is harder and harder, i relapse;

 o beat
 o blanket

 what say, nay
 what thrust of glib spit
 ancient or dust
 cloaked
 would you wet this
 peasant soul for?

like what is with all the "o"s?

has your vibrator stolen your throat?

like, really,
where the fuck did mystery go?

   too hard she said

was like:
i haven't even taken my pants off yet.

on that pulse poem

as much as i love myself
i will always remember that spook of a poem
as the eclipse of tears
where i knew
i knew

i would never be your poem
your ever after, or the

ring finger,


that's ok,
there is a tissue

gutshot

and i can mop
it with my tongue

rinse it clear.

debone my skeleton

my face is two rhythms;

one the reverend, gaping maw
parcelling teeth when i fuss
at my jaw, my hands like cruel
sailors stroke at bone
  or like the sun as it goes full-down
  on a toblerone.

they are sticky,
yes,
training my heart to be like my face-
like the stillness of rapture before
the crickets in the yard belch
and you are undone, or this way 
 this way son
to where the hall divides
and there are ghosts of us
striking matches in made up tents,
two-heart deep like how love should be.

later, with memory fizzling cold
i'd be facing a mirror
and slow-dancing
to my quiver lip, or jungle
beat as my eyelids
drift senseless back to you:

  with your trimmed sail mouth
  and wide ocean mouth
  your sunrise mouth
  and mouth of fish-scale


and heart of fucking slim bones ripping
through my rose blown cheeks and my fucking
heart is beating in my face so the bones
then rip through my heart and the sailors'
rum slides like tears across the gaping void
where my cheeks were once

and; fuck my  face  fuck my face
 fuck my face

i'm tired

i dont want to sip gin
i want to gulp pleasure amongst

horses in the country where the mexicans
are
or purchase railroad and build a long stretch
of heaven for when the sun sets on the great southern
bight and i am three clicks from a cliff
where the bottom is just a gulp
for the sea, the waves

with their long stretched fingers play pretty
with my corpse and lay it flat back

my eyes stare up into what will be dark sky
and maybe starlight will fill those orbs,
so dead, so vacant

and maybe as i thought of us- just the two of us
on this earth- lying on a car-crash of memory
and dancing in the country by golden manes,
and twirls of dust.

i think that my eyes will trap that memory
and the starlight overhead fill us with music,
and that, my dear, is how we dance forever.

over under

my heart is blubber
or carcass
 your sort
of gum-line with
blood on the steel
and your hands
scrub summer
off the late
ocean
sprawl

my navel
is mine for your whisper
is a nickel plated
receiver
straining shore
where some
stray lickspittle
salt-water
will fuzz, a
spark
i jolt

side to side
where your lips
shimmer
brief
again
and the horizon
quiets

my life is
minimums-
a bird
below cloud
or an autumn
i haven't met
a beat
otherness or otherwise
like three months
without a
call

and the lint weighs me down
to my slight
or just a brush of lip
from you

and my
fullness
sunrises

and my
love
 bright

  burns.

bleakd

i don't know.
waiting for my phone to halo,

melting chess pieces i am
the colour of the stain
over bricks of red, the ripening

willow or duet of flower
belonging to
arpeggio, i grant
she
 two
  or  
wished
 the
scent soda
on pop pop pop
tongue
 hessian
licking teeth
so gleam

out of photographs spread
even
i, lout

not to distract from pennies
on a bridge
  or the risk of tight
  pants

flung over streetlamp
 a chock full mouth
 
 gangbangs little words
 all words are little
  all feeling
  similar
  to   smallness

the chanting chorus
  with my heart
  with my delicate
   panacea

overboard
    not more exclaimed
    just whispered ocean
   my lilt to flower

i high, lout

  words feel
  out.


three thousand days of my life just rushed by
and i counted the morose numbers to their
end, there was strange
courts of me where i stayed and expected
more things said
though the tragedy was even
between things wished and remedies
squandered

she lifted her hands, not to focus on hands
but to cover her heart so i would
stop looking at it.

sadness.
oh.

bleakd.

"Why don't you go to Liechtenstein so you can suck the prince's cock?"

--cerulise

 te he,
the funniest read
in sparks, like a comet swift
or a grape slipper

i read and he
the dumbest seed
between soft knees
and a carnivorous
sperm bank,
well, her
sluice goose.

\\she plucked it clean
  and filled my pillow with her scratchy furs.
//
\\
//
but it weren't no well
just full devotion not so, errr,
top-hat, nor bearded

just grimy muscles with shit stains
on the walls
and a kitchen sink underneath the duvet
i blinded myself looking
at her mothballed clit
told myself to stop lollipopping it--

i think she put a disco ball on the end of it
and i was the blue light, hunchback

puttering about in the petting zoo.
though really just couldn't be fucked
to go on google maps,

and my mouth is the sorest
from mouthing.