A Series of Scenes of Your Self-Destruction

[this poem appears in the December 2016 Space issue of Severine Literary Journal]

I
Maybe I thought we were cosmic because your bedroom reminded me of deep space. Hollow and pinpoint light, gravity and silence. They pioneered a probe and found us, the latest scientific discovery, the sound of black holes colliding. They returned in awe and with audio. They had bentbacks leak us into their ears and transcribe us on paper: all brackets, no speech. They published us in journals. Some say the recording sounded like being underwater. Some say it sounded like a child’s heartbeat in the hand of God. All I hear in it now is the low roar of a lonely blood rush—the sound of sitting here cupping my hands over my ears. When this started I said I wouldn’t

think about astrophysics—I wouldn’t think about parasitic absences of light more massive than stars. I would steel my limbs against gravity, the mirage of stability that fluctuates infinitely and (in)definitely. I would try to remind you of the bodies orbiting us resounding with proof that our duty is beyond spinning moons. And for a while it worked: we fought the yawn of all that negative space with blunt force, with sinewed dual orbits—but we couldn’t hide from the event horizon. You know that I stretched myself galaxy-wide for you. I wish your arms could’ve escaped Nothing’s pull and clung to me.

(I heard they’re learning you can escape from black holes.)

II
I awake from this telescopic cosmodream to find us terrestrial again. I awake, and you are a manmade natural disaster. Your shoulders creep steadily past your ears and our oceans rise inch by insidious inch. You embrace subduction like submission and our deep-earth drills birth earthquakes. You are a coal seam screaming danger, hissing fire speech from steaming teeth. I always hear fears of coal fires but never about the men who brave the mines still, steeling eyes to onyx, daily daring the maws that mirror lovers’ mouths. I find myself among them: fire under my eyelids, soot on my skin. I know the pressure could tear me blood from bone but, god, can you blame me if when morningbreak steals its kiss I don my boots, I shoulder my pick, I soldier still

just to see the pain leak, covering your skin dark my love, viscous as an oil spill and flammable. The heave of crude waste pockmarks you, puddles in your bones. I am embarrassed to have thought us cosmic, to have made constellations of our laughter, to have been the canary in your coalmine. I am embarrassed to invoke us now like the fires of the stars when the last thing I saw of you was a lit match and the image it burned of your shrinking shadow in a stuffy bedroom that looked nothing like deep space.

shimmerings

birthday was a week ago and there’s a cicada out my window. shimmering heat like time is vibrating and ?which ways will it peak or valley in my life? is the only question and was the only question and will be God Granting anything solidifies. my throat is filled with sun-and-moon rotation and is full like I am always hearing bad news. time hums outside my window, taps a ripe knuckle on the thinning sheet separating us. time is the chained beast stamping–I know, I know I’m using words that aren’t my own to try and describe how its glare dissolves the marrow in my bones and how I know the dust of me will settle unpopulated. we are/return to leaves of grass and what I assume you shall assume and All We Do is Assume so let me use others’ words like the waves or the river running past and to the point of beginning when eve and adam awoke to find that time brackets days like cages and delineates lives like real estate. i hope i can still gather some years in this orchard but i can also see my face in my mirror mangled by my windshield/gunshots/loss i can no longer wade through. i close my eyes and take these thoughts between my teeth, i swallow Hope rind and all but Hope insidious springs thorns in my windpipe and latches to lungs like a burr, Hope latches and pollinates me with poison. if i find the time or state of mind i try to pull myself into a center and coalesce or crystallize and sometimes I find myself breathing again…………..and I’ve done it now and see I’m breathing again, but my

after this we turned the channel to baseball

[this poem appears in the July 2016 issue of The Rising Phoenix Review]

did you hear about that muslim guy who killed all those faggots?
my little cousin doesn’t know
my little cousin doesn’t know
at age 11/his voice chirping
like the whine after the BANG
and the blinking shock///I wonder if
he would call me that/if he learned
that I had died///he doesn’t know
how could he know when his father
spitting/tobacco calls the mover
a shine/when he calls his best
friend gay – a joke – his mother
laughs///when my sister, warning,
paints fingernails red/don’t start, he’s
too young to understand.

 

After Born to Run

the steel factories rusted over
and the boys with the biceps
became the men in the armchairs.
cracking open their coors
they remember the chrome, the roar,
the pride of locking the door behind
and stepping out into the night.

the factories powered down and set to rest
like the old folks, fingers callused on old wheels
and we’re the new generation of runners, baby.
though my hands aren’t half as rough, when I say
I’ll love you with all that I have in me,
I know what all that entails.

the heartland of america is a darkness
tarred by cigarette smoke and axle grease
but its new soul is stirring, springing up
in the apartments of twenty somethings
rolling up their sleeves and scrubbing
decades old dust out of corners.

grinding our teeth at the news cycles
and counting out our last dimes
like hey, maybe we have enough
to grab a beer next friday cause katie
worked three doubles last weekend: here
the new blood of the working class
curdles under the eyes of a new world
bigger than a small town, harder to run

from working more and earning less and
locked in forty year old rooms
with the ghosts of our teenage fathers: dad,
you had to work hours to get a six-string
but bridget had to work all weekend
to keep green eyes above water.

and I took a blue jean boy home last week
stead of the other way around
and although it got a little messy
i think the Boss would’ve been proud

and the badlands take the shape of fiber optic wires
and we convey our souls through fingertips
but these streets still look like a jungleland
so lets step out like old times with the night on our side

Friday Night, Mid-June, 7:42 p.m.

The only place I’ve ever loved
heat and dust and decaying
was the drive-in theater
on the south side of town.

On the south side of town
and over this fence I can see
crowded houses sleeping
and I wonder how little they have
to pay to live so near
the drive-in theater
on the south side of town.

The south side of town
is not what I am used to.
This 1950s building is decorated
with a concession stand dripping
grease and carving cavities.

The screens triumph, chain-link
monoliths. Flickering and melting
motherly colors and channeling
a half-lidded horizon. I spread my arms
on the hood of your car in spite of
whatever goofball comedy this is
splayed and echoing over roofs
and shared between radios.
We commune in a past generation’s
lawn chairs.

You say I remind you of a bird
or a little kid. We run together
into screens to the sound of cheers
ringing from all the truck beds,
we take in our mouths the dust
and the shared heat of this oasis
on the south side of town.

Answering Whitman

I breathe you into me
teacher who holds me
from the green, finally
realized, finally embodied, finally
you are the beautiful uncut hair
of graves.

I would not think the grass a suitable place
for you, teacher,
to be under and through and distributing
your proud nutrients to the august soil. Or is that exactly
where you belong, where you want to be?

I feel your head breaching
from the waves of my blood
and I know not only the grass
encompasses you but in addition
myself. I say it like I’ve met you,

but if you are the atoms I share
then I have met you. I met you
the moment I stuttered open my eyes
and met myself. Sang my own song,

the cry of birth, of life,
of greenness. Of the grass.
When I run my fingers through it
I run my fingers through your hair
teacher, and find not only myself
but you, but the endless lives before
and after mine, the endless souls
immortal (now I know it too)
and thank God that they will know
you and they will be you
and that you will also be them, and you will be green
under their calloused feet the same way you are green
under and in and through and above
and below me.

quarterlife purgatory

my friends sit around, oppressed

idleness exhaled sharply–
stuck, slack, lethargy-struck
exorcising cotidian demons
desiccating in their shells.
dull-eyed cicadas hum in couch cracks.

return mid-day, grease-stained,
half-lidded, hook-caught,
line-wrapped & liar-cast.
outside–grimed souls corrode,
bursting bloated guts
coating sister skins & reeking.

time skips, self-same syllables
shouting-strangled and back,
masked by smoke hazes & glowing screens-
the sun moves backward. they don’t notice
light melts to dark—but reverses.

honey sunkissed encouragement
cooed to flightless birds
or roadkill alike. scratching off
hopes on lottery tickets, gamblers
living this half-world of unluck
hanging on their backs, grinning,
fork-tongued.

I leave knowing the portrait
will hang, the screen will freeze,
I leave knowing I return
a helpless time traveler
where time has stopped,
with empty hands.

the duality of renewal

It was spring and my mother’s hair started to grow back.
Close-clipped grass. I try to remind people the smell
of cut grass is a distress signal. The facemasks still hang,
dehydrated daffodils decorating her walls. The dried plum
color around her eyes deepening daily. I’m trying to grow up
but still picking my hair and the callouses off of my fingers,
failing to exit the chrysalis, aspirations past due. Eyespots
but not eyes. Little florid growths sprout on the trees and
in her blood.  I scold myself when I don’t recognize my body.
Hers is in active rebellion. Against what? Against what?
AGAINST WHAT? AGAINST WHAT? AGAINST WHAT? AGAINST W H A T ? 
Her hair curls, lamb’s wool. She still laughs when she
watches Match Game.  She spends more and more time
on the suede she only bought for decoration. A crumpling
sunflower before the mirror. I want to siphon whatever it is
that saps her blood and pockmarks her bones and to find
whatever water of Lethe that will help her not to think
about this for one day. I want to relive the days before
we had to know what these words and numbers meant.
I want to relive the days where spring reopened our eyes
to hope before the days where spring only meant a lull
before summer’s storms and winter’s crocus of death.

I have a habit (An Experiment)

Tracing fingers in riverbeds

of sand, I dream of

choking these palmed

fragments of past lives. I was once

sediment. I was once the horned

lizard darting into shadow.

My own salt falls, spurred

by pinpoint pricks, sizzling.

A skin-walker, I populate dust,

I pollute. I am dispersed,

I am rotting limbs. I am

on all fours.

 

I have a habit

 

of losing myself. My doubling

vision melts to russet. My knees

are piers in a hurricane. If my tires

could hold their shape I would leave

this all in the desert. I would break

my back with straw. I would try

to live closer to water.