Anemone

Eyes, o sand dollars!
Your gaze like a brittle star
wraps around the sea urchins that are
my eyes
and devours,
insides out,
the facile jelly your exposed viscera has created--

but buoy, tide, ocean: boy
you filled me once, fingers like eels
tickling my insides, frantically
plunging. A pearl diver, you
once held your breath for hours while exploring
my deepest fissures, exhaled deep
bubbles that rose like jellyfish. They escaped
your sealsoft body through conch-pink lips, trailing
slowly towards the surface as you sank down
slowly into all of me, my skin:
you filled each pore with our shared salt
sea sweat, you filled my milky mouth with the liquid
words of kisses, murmured moon-drawn,
writhing with the tides: "I love you."
Fisherman, you filled my heart
with blue beach-glass
hope, you transformed it from a slickshut oyster
into a beautiful, deep-sea waving
anemone, brave (foolhardy)
you trained it not to recoil at your touch.

Grown boy, ashore, too old to angle: now
you are grounded, never
does your toe touch my sacred waters. Your hand
no longer lingers lazy beside the hull of the small vessel your father made you;
trawler, your fingers do not stir the silt-smooth waves
of my pelagic hair. But still
I feel the taught pull of your nets: forgotten and torn,
their broken wisps wrap around the half-dead memories that laze, limpid
and translucent, at the bottom of my brain,
and the dredge you ran still drags deep furrows through the subaquatic ooze
of my great heart.





****************
this is a second draft.

tiny ghost

my heart is on my palms
but you wear yours on your small finger
i build a nest with my qualms
curling up while dreams of you linger

i'm only alone in spirit
following a ghost-deer's footprint
while the leaves whisper thoughts i've never had

moving inside, small bells
tinkle tinny while i'm missing you
standing in the spot where i'm used to
now you speak in words i can't spell

can you do me favors?
i know you could wrap both legs so close
around your head and skinny shoulders
but now you don't think so to both

i'm only alone in spirit
following a ghost-deer's footprint
while the leaves whisper thoughts i've never had

inside the cardboard box covered with pictures of christian bale (Jul 19 2007)

some sleepover midsummer last summer:

It's shitty when you eat food and go to sleep on your half-full, half-empty belly churning away, metabolizing regretfully in the half-dark of premorning. It's at this time that it becomes clear to you - every fault and crack in the blighted and collectivized ass of America. And slowly... as the leftovers snake their way through your upper intestine this perspective - this nearly transcendental knowledge extends and balloons to encompass the whole world. And you wonder: why. am i so alone.

Everywhere there are thousands - millions of people who I hate, they're all crawling around like only semi-conscious ants, dragging their bellies through somebody else's shit, eating and recycling it until it becomes their own, but they're still there, still happy, ever-present for my ridicule: In becoming a God, all filiality, all lovecare and mental socialism, is gone.

Sacrificing my godhead is not an option,
and even though I have you, snoozing away in the semidarkness, my titan twin chained to a bed like Caucasus we're isolated our fusion has ruined everything except one for the other and even though we're in love it's in a crystal-cut bubble suspended in impermeable space: we watch the clouds amble by in darkness only to be broken by occasional, painful visits of grinning reality.

I'm a ufo and you're a doll and we both serve our social purposes - we got memes and yours is older than mine but -

a long time ago

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like
if I never met you
and I never let myself think
that we were friends
so that we could stay together forever.
I thought it would work but then
surprises came, needing
and holding onto in
that first nervous dark.
When I saw you up there I
said yes
you said yes
but then we both said no
no no no
and it grew
that no, until
with every absent look
and touch
it said, all it could say was
I miss that itchy dark
I miss that time before
we knew who each other were,
and it said
Go away stranger
who are you,
why are you saying yes?

It Is?

My password is strong
this is my moon and it said that
but I can only wonder as I grow dizzier
over hours piling up
this is my moon but
I feel weak and it's impossible
that anything could be strong here like
gravity, for example.

I watch comets, angels
people from a
bubble made of tyvek and old thoughts
that radiates out
around me and it feels good to
think that I'm safe here
and that nothing can touch me but
the reality is that everything
can, is always touching but
I can't touch back, even
my reflection won't,
she's too busy looking
in and whispering
at what are supposed to be stars
but is really just some stuff I hung up in my bedroom
to remind myself that other things
exist other than cold
black space,
but
it doesn't really work --
I can still see her and sometimes when
the loneliness gets palpable
I call her
You.