Ask the girl with the dirt in her mouth.
Ask the girl who is all poem
now, all shapes between the shapes
she carved into her flesh
like a tattoo artist falling in love.

with what remains un-inked, the border crossings
and blue edges
and the razor bleeding
in her hand.

Somewhere a seed falls to the ground
That will become a tree
That will someday be felled
From which thin shafts will be extracted
To be made into arrows
To be fitted with warheads
One of which, someday when you least expect it,
While a winter sun is shining
On a river of ice
And you feel farthest from self-pity,
Will pierce your shit-filled heart.

my northern star,
how bright you shine for me.
and when all is dark,
you burn through my cosmic negativity,
with purest passion,
to light the road for me,
giving me a destination,
instead of just a journey.


i love you jesse

The heart ruptures, its toxins leach
into the groundwater of blood and neurons.
The muteness of cells is suddenly disrupted;
now they won’t stop chattering, replicating,
and I in my sweaty bed, watching the spider cracks
hover against the ceiling, ignore those cells
as they spin and spin.
Doctors become translators,
tapping a Morse code on my skin, trying to decipher
the language bumping through vessels and bones.
Oh, heartbreak—such a fickle thing.
Heartbreak is a squatter crouched in my kitchen,
its eyes a glittery spark, finger over its mouth,
hushing me,
hushing,
hush.

He burns me
like the Great Fire digesting London,
houses sliding into one another,
ash wafting toward the river;
like witches writhing on the stake,
looking eastward, their eyes searching
the caterwauling ocean.

if he only knew
if he only knew
if he only knew

there is a gray place
where blackly I in darkness brooded
and wrote upon my ashy bones
hollow lines of wit.

but you, damnit, you
snuck in with a rainbow and tied me up,
led me weeping to a buzzing meadow,
and washed my face with flowers.

For J

You and I
Have so much love,
That it
Burns like a fire,
In which we bake a lump of clay
Molded into a figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
And break them into pieces,
And mix the pieces with water,
And mold again a figure of you,
And a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
In life we share a single quilt.
In death we will share one coffin.

Blood transforms the warm bath water
and, in it, I see weakly
that this was a mistake.
The razor’s cut is not deep, nevertheless
the blood rushes out happily in the warm
water as if kin to it, the same
tender substance.
Rising
a new person
transformed with an icy
sense of error
I go to the sink and turn on cold water
which is not friendly to blood.
The cut is deeper than imagined.
It hurts.
Splashes on the pale gold tile,
bright red bursts like sunlight,
like exclamation points—Another Error!
I wrap a small towel around my wrist.
A small towel indicates a small error.
Soaked through
the towel’s gold is tarnished.
There is an innocent joy in the blood’s
flow that the towel and I cannot absorb.
Another towel wrapped tight in terror
slows everything down.
On a blue velvet
love seat from which love has wandered I
sit waiting.
I am an angel with an alert backbone.
I am purified from the business
of panic.

Imagine:

i stand on top of the highest cliff.
feel the wind tearing at my clothes, the elements.
the only truth left in a world of lies and hypocrisy.
the beauty of the abyss.
the anticipation, like imagining the greatest sex, an existential foreplay.
looking down into oblivion, the void.
the ground far, far away as it seems from here, but in reality only a couple of seconds away.
standing there.
feeling eternity in a restricted world.
feeling a decision in a prefabricated existence.

to draw the final breath,
to make that little step,
to know, that for once a decision was made,
to feel one foot above the abyss,
to think for a split second you can float in the air,
to feel losing balance,
to fall,
to gain speed,
to have the air tear at your hair and clothes,
to feel the cold wind violently caress you,
to see the ground coming closer,
to scream in orgiastic excitement,
to know what you have done,
to know that you have done something for once.

maybe even: to doubt,
to regret,
to wish yourself back to the top of the peak that you are pacing away from.
mercilessly
to fly into annihilation,
to see the truth, whether it is a beautiful or an unbearable truth for the fraction of a second only.

those 10 seconds would be - must be - will be much more revealing than the whole life of most other people. more true, essential, focused, divine. purer. 70 years forced into seconds. refined into pure knowledge and truth.

those 10 seconds would be - must be - will be worth a lifetime.

a worthy payment for endless agony

no more endless, unbearable pain.
no more routine.
no more repetition.
no more

-- Peace.

a silent echo rings through me
like a mountains mad crash
the scream of a mad man
released from closed lips

the answers fail the questions
time should mend it all
but i know i don't want to
forget that you were there

and i know there's no tomorrow
yesterday has left you there
but i feel you here with me
but i can't reach you to touch

you never said you were going
but i still hear your voice
today is here without you
flowers grow where you rest

poem

please believe me,
the little scream told me,
it wanted to hold me, hold me so tenderly,
floating free,
falling free,
and the stream rushes on, never stopping,
underwater, i'll breathe in that stream, until the end of life.
only the stream, knows how it will happen.
please believe me,
if you dont need me anymore,
i'll be gone soon,
i promise you, promise
i'll drown my body in wine.