agile, curious, hungry

i fell asleep on yr couch after watching
you slide out the door at 3 am
on a housecall
or maybe just like a housecat
finally
wriggling out of capitvity

who knows

you didn't come back
home but i found you in the morning.

i've held you
a couple times now
or maybe more, enough
to feel like possibly
it was a thing, like
i might hope to find you somewhere,
when i needed
a nose to rub mine into
if only you came when i called

if you came to hold me instead
of all over my raw knuckles and the skin
of my teeth in the darkness

of your seemingly endless room.

for better or worse, i see you
on nights when you decide to rub
up against me, purring a little
and in the mornings when i wake up
to find you unconscious and sloppy
your need a quiet cat
the curls over both of us
insistent and evasive at the same time.

progress (cormorant)

i biked across the hawthorne bridge today and
there was a cormorant sitting in the water
with a halo larger than a shipping container

i'd never seen a bird radiate before
the water keeping its distance
rippling like an uneasy crowd

the bird made me think of myself

and all the poems i didn't write this year

but calmer

and graceful in her loneliness

"evading desire is a form of slow suicide"

i saw the crescent caught
cut moon watermarking
a reminder in the sky of my whole life
written on an orouboric ream of paper
a hungry torus
snaking around the neck
and shoulders of my facedown self as i flicker
back and forth between 2007 and 2012
five years moving like a deck of cards
between the hands of someone older than i am
with loose fingers and a trick
of the light to make a circle
out of a thousand spinning shards.

My high school bedroom is a tomb
and i elbow the door shut
to stop the draft

it was only once i called my mom in
to clear out the ghosts
that i stopped dying in here.

Every object in this house is a fossil
of who i was
at terrible war with who i'm becoming
and the question of Becoming
is the question of desire

isn't it always?

ten swords

Yes, what I said was:

"years of self-denial at the imagined behest
of what i thought was a higher power"

years of ten swords plunged into my back
and the chronic avoidance of coping mechanisms
favoring learning processes instead
and real decisions made
with so much agency
that they render my body a yawning
tesseract,
the future an expanse filled with stars
warping to the powers of 10
like an Eames film
and my chest is full of the geometry of blades

i am a matrix of wounds
and sinewy lazers.

blood moon from the train

the last thing i remember watching
is the fishgut red of the moon
descending into the earth

so heavy and opulent
bleeding and langorous she felt
sinister and inviting i'd never thought
what it might be like to penetrate something before
truly with a part of me
instead of my hands

Untitled l

I've never felt my body go numb before,
but between the migraine and my mother
coming in with tea and a back massage
to pull the splinters of time out of me
and align the frail nerve-maps of my spine

i felt a new kind of nothing.

A present-and-i'm-here nothing
like a you-didn't-get-me nothing
because i will be happy again
and dammit we have all the same friends.

A locked-in-place nothing
like the rest of the network
took over for a second

A nothing that gently filled me after you left
my lungs, poured out of me
like liquid smoke
or boltbus exhaust
like the tar of every cigarette i inhaled
and every boy i fucked because
you did.

And after our life flashed before my eyes,
I thanked the world
for showing me something greater than you:

Untitled 1

this is a poem about how nobody loves me
and how nobody cares enough about me to come over
to my house where i'm reduced
to puppy whining in the back
of my throat
and reading other people's work
with absolutely no confidence
that i'll ever produce my own again

with this idea of a poem as a thing
a thing that i can't do anymore
because i am addicted to problem-solving
because i want every emotion
to be useful
to alleviate pain
to notify everyone about the stakes of suffering

because i want to be whole
because i want to feel
like i was never abandoned
that my parents love me
that my brother isn't sick
that i'm not sick
that i

that i am.

i can't control what i am
i can't control the universe
the spinning moon

i can't control the way an allusion
to a cow in a poem makes my heart expand
softly as i recall everything beautiful about the day
i spent with adrian listening
to moos in marin county
calmly waiting for nothing
but more happiness.

untitled, a year old

i have been running away from these feelings for months

learning the skill of bottling-up

and now i'm here

can't leave the house

because i know if i do i'll start sobbing

can't be around people

because today i am too sad for them

and i need too much

and i don't want to hurt them

with my love