viscid ingenue

there are canny tests --
the data is slavering.

     it's not what you can make
     but what you can bear.

built a fourteen-ton typewriter out of
soak rags and car parts,
             -- you can use it but i can't
be here all day to help you key hop
                your recipe for a napalm sugarboil.

to avoid getting pinched
drink glass marbles in milk,
disguise self as a semicolon,
                       or, demurely, demi-.
stay under the gossamer tarpaulin.
tape those nipples --
perma slick.
 
nestle in Lt ripley's heaving ribs,
tongue battery temple,
                         bob for apple sacs.
apropos our scopophiliac
                        less mirror! -- more mirage!

this black casing

i'm careful
cher got me drunk
this time but not too
wasted
i only lost a few hours

i toss my phone down and
it accidentally plays one of your
screaming messages from last week
threatening suiciide and i go whoa
paw at then it
vibrates once like barking

and i remember nights
and nights and nights and nights
and laughing laughing laughing
skin important/utmost

jonny poem

my best bastard
sprung from
devil town

saw you a
baby nest eagle
in cedar

when beatrice sunk into
the graphite of our
bone pencils

grown-ass now and howl
proud pale sequin eyed
screams like laughter
and blue grass hustle

the rivers
the rivers
the slide fiddle rivers
of shitty liquor and
rogue shadow medicine dust
dismantled the other kids
left us to leave and return and leave
the corroded rodeo junkyard junction
so sad you could just write a song
about how it feels to be
lighter and heavier and alive
grinning bigger than the sky

hey sturdy fencepost i love you
i'll keep tracking your miles
and you keep clocking my luck cause
blood never made a truer brother

& i ain't a fuckin mind reader

i walk and walk and

come in smelling of ozone
like my sister always did after playing outside
i don't know why but the smell often
enraged me, filled me
with some slow fire like jealousy

like she was a little animal i had to attack
for being somehow wholly freer
than i could

we were all and still are little animals
i can't even shut up about it
i work very hard

and i never was
here to hurt
no body

lode/vigil

i started dreaming again
mostly i'm in houses
demanding information from
smiling people

how did i get like this
which of my actions
matter

did you
feel like you were better
at flying off mountains
than climbing them

was listening to buddy holly and realized
i've never been in love with brown eyes
someone who had them, i mean

just a bunch of seas and snakes
and frank o'hara skies
i guess, sorry bud

lesson 1: stay in the saddle

lesson 1.5: be true be true be true

in high school we got keychains
i didn't do drugs
but i had a buddy holly keychain
and put safety pins through my wrist skin
and i once stood on a table at lunch
just stood
until the principal demanded me down,
told my parents i was on drugs

and i was like where's my fucking breakfast club

we like haik us

pull the strings apart
muse a sad ukulele
do we lie to us

~

stay and you can sha ke/me
things that suck about knowing:
lick your wolf head clean

~

stomping dark circles
i like how you pronounce it
can we hear again

ars amatoria

when i think about loving some people i think about holding them strongly

when i think about loving some people i think about them holding me strongly

when i think about some people loving me i think about them holding me lightly while i shake with sobs
             and how that's pretty weird, i'm not used to touching my friends because i'm
sensitive
             but i did kiss mand at 12 on new year's, that was a fun small thing
             remember when we all were kissing that one time
             and i kept telling kan                                       you're so beautiful

and did you know my fingers type your name compulsively like 50 times a day

i have future voodoo chants

champion tendons

dormant oases

o boy

not a poem

i haven't written in this blog in a non-poemvoice for awhile; it makes me feel kind of mentally hobbled.  this is also how the internet is making me feel lately.  it's a sensation i generally experience around the beginning of march, the need to be outside in the air, to be meditative and benign and to soothe the frayed edges of my winter brain.  i've been zipping through this short, closed electronic circuit in frantic loops and now i have a desperation to bust out for awhile, maybe.

everything i write lately seems to be all dire direness (though i am stronger than ever and still my wry merry self amidst the deep important sad feelings).  i often worry about burdening whatever audience i may have with this; i have the sensation of burdening a lot, and being burdened.  i think this is a personal anxiety i have, but i also think it's probably true that expressing depression/distress publicly can solicit such a reaction whether or not one intends to.  i mean: when i think someone i like is sad, i care a lot.  

i'm not going anywhere with this.  just typing it out because it's what i want to do, and i don't have any conclusions yet.  may there never be conclusions (maybe).  my raw tiger flank is stiffly healing and nothing has felt so good or made me so pleased in awhile.  i want to be among friends and eat and talk and learn about everything they are thinking.  i want to be deeply alone.  i want to be such a good animal.  i am so sincere and full of love.  i want to read all the novels i started and never finished in school.

poetry

will might ruin your life.


poetry

will ruin your life

but it's okay if your
life is just a tv show you
watch sometimes.


poetry

i've been bored since i was born.


poetry

at xmas my aunt gripped both arms
asked me how i was and i said           the same
she eyed me grimly and said
good
the same is good
it can get a
lot worse


poetry

my aunt did not molest me

like if my life was on television

that might have happened

like
        i'm sorry


poetry

this is a joke.


poetry

i remember sitting in trees
climbing into the greasy dog house
twizzler pull and peels


poetry

bffs bffs bffs bffs bffs bffs bffs

feed me
everything you know
about secrets.


poetry

narcissism.


poetry

i didn't spell narcissism right on the first try.


poetry

i just learned my kitchen table that i got from my grandma
was actually the table in our kitchen when i was little,
the white table my dad butchered a deer on
in my earliest memory.


poetry

why is my affect ablur

i'm joking

summum bonum

 and so and so what

that one foot will always be

planted where nobody can see.

i want to tell you a story             about

the first time tom robbins did acid,

about this book i read where there's a lion made of flame

who bounds over desert sand and each dune is a different color,

or about how things are                 complicated,

and enduringly ambiguous,

i am at once so many ticks on a spectral lattice

my genes maybe too distilled from that inborn unrest

up the branches on both sides of the tree,

i worry i might
i might be "actually crazy"
am ecstatically lucid
need to be better
i am not my father
my poetry sucks
and is whiny
i'm cruel
nothing hurts
i am brr serk
the kindest
i am like 1/4 gay
is it okay to say
that i am so good
i can do every
thing feels too much
i am rapturous
furious god
it hurts do you
like me i
want to hide

all of this radiates

from my animus in widening deep-throb circles

like elephants calling to each other across miles

in tones too low to hear, like

the earth itself is sighing

i love

everything

i read this french book about a woman

who kept turning into a sow -

i am number

today i think it is

just one & how nice to be

curled in the brain basket

dreaming softly of

the shape of time

over great bounding arcs

tree poem

i am never lighter than when i hold tight onto a tree,
press my head close and feel the strong fiber circles
plunge down
deep; syrupy wet cellulose. 
it can be still and safe then.
pull smooth green bark twigs to my lips; consider
quietly with my tongue;
whisper hi, hi, hi, hi,
                                        tell me about being

all the mom voices on the phone are almost crying,
want to be crying but won't, i absorb them
into my black hole of holding
whatever hurts.

pack it up

every ginger door
splinter sore slams
                           o-shit structural damnage
blow grit out
orbiting tinny feedback loops
nuzzle all the rubble

i can't carry:
this
                  all of it i
mean       i'm going to kansas city
with a rocket for a spine.

& die because my giving floats astray
                               i miss cigarettes
miss my dragon drug
want my fucking
CIGARETTES CIGARETTES CIGARETTES CIG-
ARRETS

but i don't write much about things i used to do.

& don't worry i'm used
to it like i'm used to feeling used to feeling             my own tits.

a team of kind spiders
is already weaving my new hide,
                       built-in acid panels
solar self-soothing                    
                         
but allow me to wish for
                                     just one body
                                     i could trust
to be wiser than i:
because i find i'm often kind of fucking dumb

artifice of cold

i wonder if i failed you because
my distress signals emerged as sarcastic gestures.
i should definitely not have made the jerk-off motion,
or tongued the cleft of my finger-v,
or flipped you the stiff double bird over my shoulders
all those times i fled down the stairs
to antarctica.

it is quiet here and the rope muscles
ache along my spine
but the wind feels nice
on my dumb puppy skin.
i don't miss the internet
kind of. i can play all this hot tv
in my head           i do miss feeling like
there was a second where i could have
slipped out the side door unnoticed,
kneaded the smudge of me from the ether,
stepped slyly from frontier to shining frontier.
instead now i'm
spear hunting                 or forever
wandering sad distant whiteout circles,

i'm so alone and i wish i
could have gathered with me from my spam folder
all the sweetly pining fake russian women,
                                                             whisper you are safe, i love, you are safe.
over the next few months they metamorph
into dark-furred huskies, my vyki, my nika;
at the cusp of perma-night
in our glow tent they curl with smile eyes
in tight knots against me

cessation

i will not read

the comment section of

the daily sun the article about

my dad's "retirement"

i will not let a sudden train blast

make me cry

i will not crumble and seethe

a little, inside

when coworkers gossip about

their nanny's eating disorder

i will not play with magic

i will not tear the delicate

origami leash on my

white throat

i

any poem

[Richard Brautigan]