target

i have not let my interpretation speak
for itself, for it lacks a self
and no one is there to scoop it up
and recite it.
i am elsewhere-
i am writing poems-
pretending to be a wildcat
though i am bound-
still there has got to be something
i care for enough to name and
set apart.
it doesn't matter if i'm awake to this,
i woke up moments before any message
was even sent to wait for it,
dreamed that all the walls had windows
and i was hovering like a target.
the focus is lack
the dissonance is filthy tangible
i've been practicing
i've been practicing writing poems
until i love them
and then throwing them away.

self status

we talk about how we do believe in prayer
and i feel like i've been in your studio apartment
for months. the ice cream has melted,
and i'm not sure how long i was asleep
with your book open over my face,
or whether you would have used the word
"energy" before, when we first met.
we met at the coffee shop down the street
it was a blind date
this girl neither of us knew kept showing up everywhere
and last night we sat on the bench downtown
where you first opened your phone and called me
to make that date. we kissed there, obviously.
it felt like two things
closing their eyes and forgetting
where they were going. it felt like a string
wrapping around a tack on some map somewhere.
i keep forgetting where i am going
where i have been has become a caustic
language i speak of in third person. a little
poem that only sounds good to me if the audience
is impressed. turns out the girls name is erin,
and just last week we saw her, dancing
when those performers invoked a storm.
i was supposed to dance there, too
and as i sat next to you, watching,
the assurance i'd once projected looked to me
like a piece of ice floating away with the cold rain
drifting or being drug from the rocky shore,
and i felt pretty sure i was neither
on the ice or the shore.
i would say i was in the water, but if it's cold enough
to make ice it would be cold enough to wake me up.
i have lost some status i'd given myself, or rather,
i am no longer capable of officiating self status. i am
melting from one to the next, the ice has gauged my
silence, and from one to the next i go,
from one to the next.

weightless

went out to the woods with a folder
and an "all creatures veterinary clinic" pen.
sign says "visitors please secure all your personal belongings"
bugs so loud they sound like planes, planes so loud
they cocoon half the scene, their serious
little bodies, thorax filled with business trips,
everything secured.

watched a bird jump down into the grass, brave
without the thought of it.
watched a bug bite me.
watched a group of deer coming out of the brush,
one to sit in the setting sunlight.
the sky was a filmy yellow seal
like mucus that protects a throat.

when we move truth up the stomach
and over the tongue, we break the seal
that the indifference of others makes.
indifference is our nature. mine is not a threat to me,
but when most of us are now being
cut out of the opinionless womb of our mother,
we need to get dressed for the after party.
we dress in preparing for contact.

out here, i am entreated by the fear
of what we must be capable of
just to keep from knowing.
the problem, the whole problem is the knowing.
it feels like something i justify
once i've moved with the fractured lies
i've made, severing around my realizations
that the wishes of others cancel each other out
and spin the o-zone into place.
so to keep going
we must go without the thought of it,
into the brash of gravity, unknowing-
everything weightless must let the memory go.

translation

i've come home swirling
and i won't allow any questioning about it.
i've seen the light
die by fades
but i'm yet to see you, neighbor,
rejoice in much of
anything.
your questioning seems elegant
to the decided among us,
asking an explaination for the spilled purse.
my insecurities make you
some fonder of a prince,
diddling little locusts of kill,
little buzz moments that make me
chuckle, sobering
the drafted aggregate.

the doubts sure seem to convert
clearer than the epiphanies,
hand cupped to ear in interpretation.
i think some slant must be lost
in the double-sided mirror
of translation, of trekking too far from
a language one was born speaking

hell is other people

why do i do this to myself,
sit here listening to iron and wine like it's
anywhere near me, like it's some kind of
validation for the things i think people
are thinking about me to just cover my tracks
with gardens i live too far to eat from?
the better i get at this, the more i see where
i fail and fall hard, nightmares about spilling
flour and being a child. the cup can only
fill to one brim of effort, after that i
wake up before my alarm with
an alien in my stomach, wondering why everybody
gets to be god over me.
i love at everybody in the fucking eyes,
i look in them with a commitment to
speaking over the thought fungus,
which i thought was a commitment to myself
but now it only feels like i'm shouting--
i will not be made afraid!
and my speech gives everybody
ammunition against me.
who am i kidding? even the actions i know
are right, like pulling straws
up through a sleeping throat,
the problem, the whole problem is the knowing.
if i put on perfume, it will look like i care,
i do care but not enough to lie,
what kind of lie am i telling and to who,
how much does it matter whether you're a
nice person, this is a war of censorship
and i am sitting on my own acute fit, like
terrible orgasms that just makes your
cold sweat smell like the stress of
trying desperately to keep the boredom out.

the cat is in heat, rubbing its wet ass all over me.
the freckles on my arm look like bugs in the sunlight.
i've killed at least three bugs today

meat

there is something compounding,
the debate between clashing
and the demand for more color.

thinking is an occupational hazard.
it is the mind that cannot be cleaned,
it is a habitat, like all meat; occupied matter

it cannot exist if its dark missionaries
are not meddled with, otherwise they simply
hold vigil until it, unassuming, is exposed
and fear pierces through, creating

we cannot make up our mind because
the mind cannot be made, it is nothing
without what survives within it, and so
nothing recognized can be without discourse.


i walk outside, all gravitating toward
self self self. the black sky juts out before me
with nothing in the way.
nothing to say- the best lesson.

it is more vast than its own reference to my matter.
it weighs this ticklish amount
and i become lucid, magnetic. aware of
the weight share of all potential positions

the self cannot remain silent
until all is or until it is gone. yet i can be used
as a comfortable constellation, fixed as any spun star-
moved only when moved by matter around me