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.