I forget how many jobs I got let go from and how many houses picked me up, sheets and everything, and dumped me around the corner until some other work, some other roof overhead, seemed to gather me up and dropped me hence. 

And any of the people that had been counted correctly, including me, could move or die, making the incorrect count accurate once again, if only for a moment.

CYCLE

i sit
drip blood
think i am
such a giver
(whether
i want to be
or not)
where’s your effort
your trail of crumbs
leading to
better understanding
safer sex
i love you
you

I am in a storehouse of answers, am I not? I head for the reference desk even though there's no one behind the counter.

No one comes. I walk up to the bike. The seat’s taller than my bike.

Upward Mobility

First, we push the children into their games and giggles, to insulate them from obscenities circulating in the kitchen  / Then we lose our temper, & act like masters of a new

It was revolution by music. The world would never be the same.

I don’t smoke, I called out, but no one heard me, and I sounded uncertain. 

seeds

when nothing smells like you
i let dawn-colored fruit rot in the blue bowl
spray perfume thru the air and try to touch 
myself the way you touched me

too bad we met/never met

I just remember the room dense with familiar sound, the melancholy howl of the perfectly in-tune saxophones, the electric brilliance of trumpets, a drummer with eight arms; my mother looking over at me, expectantly, as if to say, “This is what you wanted, right? This is making you happy?”

What will be will be. She was a good swimmer, and at least he was getting some exercise. 

in the bella resource center

that lesser bond girl
her name was a play on genuflect

i can be good
lowering myself to the ground
everyone says reverent but they always
mean deference

i

I leave behind a lot of empty wine bottles.
You said eat anything in the fridge and I did
right down to the last gherkin.
Unrelated: your turtle is dead.
You failed to mention it and I failed
to

...a person is like an ocean, or a country, or a forest...

The grass here is incessant.

A deep hole.

It wasn’t my fault we started talking.

Ess saw it first at 2:03 AM.

Do you remember this one?

One of us photographs...

the fact that i love cats...

I believe with perfect faith in the perfect expectation that no matter where I am my iPhone will have access to the internet via Wi-Fi or at least 3G.

Exposing myself to the dumbest ideas and the most hateful weirdos online triggers a chemical reaction that gives me pleasure, or something like it. A hoarder of bad ideas, stacking them all up into wobbly piles that might someday topple and crush me.

The song on repeat, singing to Scout, for some reason stranded, standing on the patio table, dead-center, like a reanimated roast, and my father, drunk and shirtless, passed out in a pile of mulch in the yard.

July yawns. Flashes its grills...

At last our molars burst forth from the gum and we emerged from the rose-colored womb of our first grade classroom.