Can I Kiss You Once Each Year? 2

Wake from the dream
where I lick your toes
each until your alarm
goes off to go to work, eyelids droop.

I can't have forgotten.
Mouth dry, awake at 12:31 A.M.
on fire.
The kitchen in order and your car locked.

Not Friday.  Saturday.  Sniff
your hair trailing over the sofa arm.
Tell the difference.
Song of the stereo still playing

in the dream background,
the real crash in window shard sliver.
The slaughter houses we march
after well rounded breakfast.

Wake with a second pinch
to rinsing a shaver and huff polish
a mirror with bare elbow so that
you can see, held right,

the flipped image
of what I shaved into your hips.
You are seeing a breeze on the brush.
Let me lick my thumb!

We are going to be rich.
Can I say hello?  Once.  Every year.
Darling, golden, purr.
Purr and hum.  The track's song.  Fault lines.

Can I Kiss You Once Each Year?

Wake from the dream
where I lick your toes
each until your alarm
goes off to go to work.

I can have not forgotten.
Dry mouth awake anew.
Something on fire.
The kitchen.  The kitchen!

Not Tuesday.
Saturday evening
familiar
song of the fire alarm.

Rice burns and quench
in the sink.
Metal split and screech bubble
boil bang and bssshhhhhh.

Sweat drip from eyelash,
from brow and scalp tight.
Breathe heavy, fingertip tremor,
eye's wide.

We are going to be rich.
All of this money.
Boil.  Handsome, darling, golden, purr.
Purr and hum.  The track's
song.  Fault lines.

I Wanted to Have Children

Work to tend the bones and tissue paper of this body
while its mind decays its every core
until the day it slumps like a pumpkin in July,
sun beaten, fly ridden, gas plumaged, colorful
in the way wood nearly charcoal
will glisten in the right cut of daylight.
"Who's afraid of a great big clock?"
Another death, another thing this body
will refuse or break to do.  Dare turn the key,
then knob, and force the door again?
Dare fumble one arm into that dark, cheek pressed
to the door's jamb, eyes pressed closed,
teeth pinching tongue's tip to
remember where the damned switch is
before something cold and wire haired and wet
brushes your wrist and you rip your arm away.
"No, please.  Please, come in,"
says the dark doorway.  You'd better run.
Leave it closed, but linger,
palm to the metal knob.
"Die now.  Die later.  It is all the same to us."

The Workman's Song

to the tempo of quick step blue grass




You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(instrumental)
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
Silicosis all throughout your lungs.
Your boy'll say you had a good run.
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.


He said, she said, wear a mask,
I said I am right on task.
To get silicosis and, in a few, up and die.


You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
One of these days, roll over to your wife,
yawn, and she's gone to grab a knife
Thing she woke up to, skin be zombie blue

.
I'm just going to hold my breath.
Hammer and chisel will do the rest.
I've still got good air 'side my breast.


You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
Crystals cutting up your insides.
Undercutting all of your pride.
Don't you know the margin just ain't that wide?


I'm going to blow my nose real hard.
Get out every last single shard.
Son, you best believe I'm keeping guard.


You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(instrumental)
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.
(i)
Silicosis all throughout your lungs.
Your boy'll say you had a good run.
You're going to get silicosis and up and die.


The nurse said "weeks, he's got a few.
Next of kin: would that be you?
Yes, it's silicosis and he will die."

Shoal 2

My mother is taking selfies
with me in the picture with red corduroys
stripped down to a sliver to tie up my dreads
with a smile like a badger in good company.

All I hear is the waves come nearer
and the towers of the Gold Coast
leering on.

I would like to drop to knee
and shovel the Michigan water
into my face
I eat camera flashes easily.

Mean nothing, mean sleazy,
I'd fuck her right easy.  Pop on the couch
picking his nose.

I don't care all that much.  A bucket of blush.
Douse her in a shower of gasoline.
With a match and a kiss,
hopefully the rest of the house takes
and brings everything to ash kush.

Everyone waits for a shooting star.

Everyone waits for a windfall.

Not everyone waits

for

a way around

a sentence.

Blazon

Shot down
Shot up
With a math
I cannot parse.

Shot down
Shot up
Shooting myself with
Hollow points

Watching the spray
With hollowed eyes
And words
I cannot say.

You know the names
That burn my lips
And still too stilled
I cannot pray.

Sky giants in my skull
Pulled from pages
I cannot review
Because they'll take the bones of my skull
to places from I cannot return.

Where it, wear it, wuz it son?
Come back to me, come back to see
what you dig up from the source.
What is all of us, but suggestion from the core?

Com bat with black on the edge of a wayward soul?
Way-ward sombitch
along the way
to the red that makes a course?

D chord.  Under the sun.
Clouds like breath in Winter.  Too much
makeup on you, on me.  Too much tall grass
for September.
Turn us down.
Save definitely for the Fall.  Right now is
ugly Summer, underdressed and over Seussed.

Bestys

and you want to come back in here
like some kind of god damned tourist,
like some kind of season ticket holder
with a soda can and a discount
and four kids
and enough bags
to put away a chop sawed pig?
You want to come back in here
with metal detectors blowing off sounds
like broadsides and enough junk
in your veins to make contact highs at
twenty paces?  You want my arms
around you like I haven't dreamed
dreams of putting your face in
a table mounted vise?
And you want to come back in here
like some kind of god damned
hand stamped tourist?

Microtrip

When I was a kid in kindergarten
I used to imagine the world around
me in claymation.  Now
things are a little different and a little bit
the same.  I am your core;
humming belief err
through the night,
stunted sleep tear,
the seer licking sights.

Things To Remember

It is not okay
to be in a park after dark
with a shovel.
It is not okay
to sprint
anywhere after 1 A.M.
It is okay
to mess your pants
if and only if someone points a deadly weapon
at your face already too scarred.
It is okay
to call it a day when
you know you've had enough
of anything worthy of metrics.

It is never okay
to cash out
for convenience's sake
regardless of how
another day will
measure up
to what you just went through.

Juice Box

I did buy juice today.  It has been
more than a year to the day
since I bought juice to keep in my home.

My friend tells me
about several a thing
related to juice and we agree
that no matter how poor,
no matter how badly your parent fucks up,
every kid should have the opportunity
to have a sippy cup of juice available to them.

A common denominator.  From young to old.
To cracked out 65 year old woman
asking you if you want a cup of juice,
the distance is bridged instantaneously
once the apple sweetness bites
from the back of that Dixie.

Everything is okay and you are you again,
a kid who fucking loves apple juice
and summer time scraped knees
and dog spit on your mouth
because if you were not out
in the afternoon batting rocks into the woods
what the hell else could you possibly
dream up being in to.

The Writing Comes Apart, Face to Circle

To have in a head the idea of a story.  The bones and muscle
of it all flexing like a body newly waked and unsure of its own
limitations.  Unsure of the points where, yes, this fingertip ends
here and what is felt there is the space where skin does not turn
into low thread count fabric, but joins the surface of the media
and feels.  The space where the idea of being's is ends and
affectation, the extension of the being, begins.  The relationship
between the end of existence and the beginning of
something unpredictable.

I have been staring at a breast.  A woman is trying to
figure out what brand of food her cat will find acceptable and
toying with the idea that it is, after all, an animal and dissecting
within herself the reasons why she should care if the pate is premium
or not, because the cat will not starve itself longer than it has to,
but I can see it is a losing battle because she wants the cat to be
happy in a way it would not otherwise be without someone
to fawn over it and she grasps that there is no difference
to the animal, but the difference only exists within herself and
it perplexes us both.  Her reaching
for the top shelf.

As I stare at the breast, the woman in tow, the tattoos
trying their best to be colorful plumage half hidden by
the flora of Friday night "things to do, if only you knew"
question beggar's sweat suit fronds, I find it harder than
the question of enabled cats to grasp the question of
what it is men see in the cup or two of fat poking up
where clothing ended too soon for the weather we are having
outdoors.  Maybe in another season I would
clap her on the back and exchange something like a "good job
with the tits there" in so many, and different, words, but now
I am just weirded.

The appeal is long gone with my own changes and the logic
slips by like a wet plastic shopping bag in a work clawed hand
wishing I lived closer to the grocery store and hoping
the miles slip by with speed before I lose my grip and
demand answers from an inanimate object. She takes a step toward
the right and my vision focuses new, still fixed, on the previously obscured
face of a ten year old girl who has been watching me wrestle
with nonsense and compunctions of orientation and motives
far longer than I realized a ten year old
could fix on anything.

I am reminded of a story I wanted to tell as our eyes meet and discuss
several a many thing in a span of seconds before she realizes
her mother has moved again along the aisle of packaged meat
and she is expected and quite possibly late of course
for what could be the umpteenth and deciding time for a trip
to the wonderland of the cookie aisle.  I smiled and waved back.
The cat food woman sashays beyond me to the foot locker of foibles
to perhaps be drawn upon for later character sketches and
I am left to wonder,

left to hope that maybe in the time she spent she caught
a reflection of what I still chase and what she still has to learn to hate
or may never have an opportunity to and instead be, besides,
but beyond the paper lion and the twig mouse I am reminded
of a story I wanted to tell, as her face came into focus and trotted away,
about a time when I saw a man look at me with fusion in his eyes
when I was too young to remember and it ended
where the divide between memory and memorial stones build walls
too high to see above.  I want to be remembered in the way
I can't remember my own.  I want to be apart.  More than anything
apart from the story.

The Children 4

Six Flags Great America was a hell hole.
Sixteen years old and
the manager was nineteen.

She spent a lot of time
in the bathroom and when
she was not there
she was busy
writing her name,
in puffy letters
with the insides of the "A"s
shaped like pudgy, irritated, sphincters,
on every blank piece and back side
sheet of paper in the red ink
reserved for till totaling and
performance reviews.

When I wasn't busy
explaining to customers
that they could not have their choice brand
of pop and would have to settle
for equally fattening competitors
because posting a sign
was frowned upon,
I sat next to the funnel cake fryer coils
watching white bricks of lard
melt into amber pools
listening to them groan
against the background of screams of
thrill seekers unable to find
excitement enough in their day to day and
wondering why ear plugs
are acceptable in less jarring factories and
not in a mill whose only purpose
was to extract violent sounds from
every throat that passed through its gate.

Afterward, turned on and off and on again
by her antics and
the stink of sweat and some kind of
poorly defined fear seeker passion
mingled rich with wave tank chlorine and
head spinning sunlight, I sat outside the gates
in air too cool for late August
waiting for my parents to pick me up,
knowing they would show
eventually and
the children sat with me.

Fumbling in the flowers
patterned after American flags and
bursts of fireworks
fallen to the grass and all
various shades of street light silenced orange and black,
they clawed and danced and tagged one another,
climbed up my back and lolled in my lap,
yawning and laughing and itching my
polo shirted elbows.

They fell over each other and poked
at my cheeks and asked me
so many questions, but they
kept me company
against the eleven P.M. winds of
another summer night
burned away and replaced
with the stiff, flaky char, of
"this really is, all there is" glass shard scattered
flights of "one day at a time" fancies
they kept me warm inside and
tuned and uncoiled my knotted nerves and
laid them straight once again,
that my hands could play a song
in the absence of the sun
on an instrument
not too far out of tune and
not too far gone to,
once and for all, put away.

Runner, Do Your Thing

The shorter your shorts are
the faster it looks like you're going,
until they get so short
I can see the crescents of your ass
peeking out like complimentary glazed biscuits
in a white racing striped powder blue bread basket
on a table at a restaurant
I know I could never afford to eat at,
but that I sometimes walk by and pretend not to see.

Then it doesn't matter how hard you work them legs,
cause you're moving in slow motion to my eyes.

Fly Dye

I wear my pants big and my shirts small and
keep hi-fi extra long plays of h.f.s.tival days in a deck
next to my loser remix ep by beck.
I'm a walking 16 bit throw back to years
when tears for fears went heads up to violator
and terminator X was tag trending up in sample
mixes and Lando still sold beers and all
anyone wanted to talk about was foil
embossed marvel comics fleers and clear slammers.
Got shades from the days when urkel used to stammer,
and baloo's only bear necessity was
a good set of spanners and a boozed out nap
to keep sky pirates at bay
and doug funny could still be had if
you did your chores the night before and got up
early Saturday. My shoe strings are as fat as
the orange lasagna cat drawn to cells
and when my cellphone rings it's
the god damn muppet babies theme.
I hum super mario world seven dash two
while I polish my louvered 280z
painted in optimus prime red
and silverstreak blue parked outside my house
tucked up next to my cutlass,
with its windows tinted darker than darkwing duck
and looking meaner than my decepticon tattoos.
I don't rock tie dye or g-unit bras,
cash millionaire chains or sagged out skinny jeans,
faux nerd glasses or nikes filled with exotic gasses,
but when you see me you'll know
where I'm from and exactly why
to this day I'm still pretty fuckin' fly.

Feel Good

A woman is walking ahead of me
in the dust and gravel and popped
aluminum tabs that jingle like
the lost keys to happiness
when Friday sets and Saturday rises
and eyes blink in the dry air
behind a bus trundling away
one step too fast
into the vein I missed.

Her bags are thin
ambitions pointed setters
pushing hard toward home improvements
with tools she may use,
or may hold with the best intent.
The gray tagged handles
poking through the tan and stretching clear film
are like the grays in her pinned bun
coming unsprung,
but not for lack of care.

My bag is light,
closing the distance,
my feet taking on the bounce and turns of
her swinging plastic,
my head taking on little dreams of
the things she is planning to do,
the emptiness of my pockets and
purpose locked in the gap between
planning and my own lost keys
filling with her determination
to do and thrilled to be
on a way apart from
the things I've missed and
less aware.

I kick a stone
that smacks against a crushed can
pool of reflected Saturday sky and
cut back the opposite
as she looks to see
what it is that will overtake her next and
I match her steps
while she looks away and
feel the seconds of her filled hands sway and
springy grays and knob knuckled grip and
time compressed spine and child bored hip and
the home she intends to fix and care tender and
her face turns to right,
satisfied that nothing is come,
directly into the sun
of my chip toothed smile
and upturned shades.

She blinks and returns
with a sigh and a touch of her hand
to her breast and I
do the same
in returning to my own and
bid her the best of days
as I walk on toward nothing so beautiful,
nothing so concrete as a destination
in the heat of summer and
nothing but buses to catch and
repairs to make
to homes I dream
with empty pockets and bags and
graying hairs laced across my mind.