How Come No One On Twitter Is Talking About This
The eye a camera humming across the top of the earth : cavern
gully ravine gorge Far below a tiny man jumps into a tiny pool Black
pool wet pool pool pooling around itself a
shimmering thing in the night Did I mention the night Hot and dry
on our faces Another word for dry is incommunicado I am not
going to apologize for this
anger This eye like a knife cutting through the hair : gray gray white
underneath the brown Bone sticking out oddly A small mesh screen between
ourselves and the truth the truth holding onto an orange phone repeating
some version of I didn’t do it I know we are running out of time is a cliché
so I try to re-phrase it to say it some way you’ll understand : have you seen
our dog the way he worries his paws the dry
skin like a snake on his belly I know you care about the dog But when I go outside
to find you to ask you if you’ll bear witness to our sky’s empty convulsive
grief you’re nowhere to be found The june bugs hitting themselves
against the siding The eye still performing its fruitless
scanning The somethings
whistling roughly through the tops of the palms And overhead a dark pool
gathering dropping nothing of itself refusing to yield even one syringe full
to the yellow door growing bigger and more luminous in our minds
It’s Weird And Pissed Off, Whatever It Is
The dry bleached mountainsides waiting to ignite.
Don’t fight it, it’s supposed to burn.
We’ve been waiting here for our drinks for entire minutes.
If you are feeling overwhelmed tonight by
contemporary life
there is a QR code in the kitchen you can scan.
Really, it’s our own human presences that have forced
the natural rhythm of things to this unlit staccato.
Don’t ask me what it does; I haven’t tried it,
I lied.
I ate the piece of rotting cactus someone threw
over the fence.
I don’t remember the last time he kissed me.
What we wore when we decided it was over.
The mountains again: fuck you
for wanting to conquer them, their symbolic whatever.
Did you hear those clouds.
I wanted to write a poem about Kurt Russell
in THE THING but this is the best I can do: cold and far
away, perhaps inhabited by something other,
staring across the landscape and awaiting
the quiet end no one feels good about.
It Works In Any Space, From Bedrooms To Kitchens
I have spent some time wondering
about the condensation gathering beneath
my legs at night I have draped my window
with ocean print cloth It’s a very versatile
print consisting largely of red octopuses and
chartreuse kelp and a single off-center
jellyfish Sometimes I look at the jellyfish
It seems off to me I touch it
It feels like nothing It feels like nothing you
have touched for sure I worry that
my fingers are too rough or angry I think about the
jellyfish injured assessing
the damage finding itself lopsided lining up
the crosshairs of its floating mind with
some intended central point It once had a home
It once took note of a
butterfly The jellyfish has had no water
for a long time It feels cold It feels
very far away It is old older than you know
How cold do you think you
would have to be before your fingers
forgot how to work Should you try it Should you really
get that deep Should you have
another latte another selfie Should you write
that blog post How much time
before you have to meet the guy at the hip
experimental art bar Do you think you could
get cold enough before then Do you think your skin
could go all blue and transparent Do
you remember how to stop the
noise In the selfie now you look quite still You look
like someone else’s imagined
idea of the north pole The infinite
imagined to be curving in on us all the time There
was a ghost horse sent up into space Galloping
in an arbitrarily large radius You heard it once
below you As if projected onto an underground
inverted screen You heard it
in zero different ways We observe the sky as it appears
blue and cold and without sin More of me and
more of me and more of me and more of me
is seeping into the land My hand raised up
with nothing in it It comes from the ocean
There is too much of it to weigh or count
Sometimes it can build up inside a person like a
storm It can make your flesh hard
It can be used to mark the difference
between silence and awake If you would like
to stay here I have built you a display case You cannot
grow at all here or learn the alphabet or
the stages of grief But you can love me And
you can touch my skin And isn’t that a way
to stay alive until tomorrow?
It’s This Again
I think I was in love with Mozart in another life these recycled sunrises these
tired trees layered limply on top of their own ghosts out of the corner of my eye
a shoreline and out of the shoreline nothing suppose you could
touch it suppose you could try: that moment you knew there was something
to be tasted that it was worth it the ragged edges of forced laughs the filtered
image of the couple some nightmare version of us on the beach with those
stupid hats suppose
you could make your mouth into the shape of me
in my mind I have devoured all the screens I have seen us
together in unlit rooms the perfume of something irresistable creating
a seal around us mesh around tangerines rotting tangerines soft when you
touch them too sweet I have seen your lips on mine and
in the mountains impassible tides and in the tides
phosphorescence
the world I can imagine you in is all streetlights weird pine trees you would
never have climbed one you would have waited for me you would have
climbed one but only halfway you would have spent a long time looking
for it (the right one) you would have climbed it in order
to come down you would have filled entire hours with someone else
in a house I’ve never seen you would have taken it and made it palatable:
diminutive hardy green I know that things go on
no matter what their form the red-faced boy I bore the sweaty fern
outside your door the volcanic thing aching in the lonely ocean of the night age-old
atoms stuttering through some kinetic memory event
trying this time for closure for a formal ascension to place I have never wanted anything
but the last three symphonies as loud as possible searing through the beloved’s flesh
Another Inexpensive Solution With A Big Payoff
We bought a house recently so now I have a house I want to stress
that this is not an allegorical house This is a real live house
One thing you have to do with houses is decorate them make them
look like they are real places where real people live and love each other and have
“inspiration” This “inspiration” often takes the form of vases and cleverly arranged
unread books Did you know that when you are decorating a house
you are also helping to shape its personality Every house has a personality Some
are Type As pretending to be “chill” Some are immigrants Some
are cool blue pools with nothing inside and no bottom Some
are anxious to see you leave Some are sad withdrawn high high up
so interested in turning on the fan and closing their eyes I don’t
know how to live in a house or how to inhabit
space I don’t know what shade of tinted primer to use I am a tall strange
silence with no feet Everyone keeps telling me about “self-care” Most
mornings I wake up and I fucking hate myself which seems positive it seems
like a step in the right direction When I was younger I wanted to go
off the grid to leave society and live in the wilderness in a cabin in
Maine and now here I am I just bought a house in the suburbs I drink
kale smoothies and I like them I enjoy going to Target I follow
Kim Kardashian on Instagram ironically In my house when you
enter I want to have a big skull and a defaced portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald
just very casual-like displayed above a tasteful brown urn full of
baby’s breath I want to fill one room entirely with pieces of confetti
on which I have printed the word “fuck” really tiny so only a tiny person
could read it I am probably going to go with neutrals for the living room and
dining room areas From the backyard I want some spiders to
creep in They will be wet They will look like
they have been through a weather event I want the bedroom crammed
with empty glass cases I want the kitchen angry and
thick with steam I know I cannot avoid mirrors I put on
three layers of skincare products this morning
sensitive skin eye cream anti-wrinkle moisturizer tinted sunscreen
I am obsessed with thinking about what The Thing is that will come
into my life and destroy it will it be cancer will it be the death of a child
will it be An Accident It Was Just A Normal Morning and We Had Coffee
Like We Do Every Morning And Then will it be the suicide
of a friend will it be the slow attrition of passion until I can no longer
bring myself to chop avocado touch my husband read a novel laugh
by accident until I am a slow dark cradle rocking somewhere beneath
the continent I am trying not to think like this I have a house to decorate