Smoke

Nauseous and incomprehensible
my stomach reaches up
turning over my lungs.
The fire alaram tickles into screeches
and we rush pry windows into crossdrafts.

I'll vacuum tomorrow (4/25)

All day I mired by the window
forced wonders at what I might
maybe get to doing.

Soaked too long int he tub
with water too hot
but I mired anyway.

If from afar I saw a loved one
practicing such self-abuse
I would scold with advice well meant
and take their body out to the world
where suddenly they'd remember the delight it is to be;
where they could sweat their souls back in.

But
unfortunately
I am not a far off lover
for whom I would delight in heroic rescue
it's just me
putting things off,
watching a fourth episode of Law & Order
while mired by the window.

Written 4/24, in response to a poem read in class called "dis-pelt"

 Dis- :

A prefix that shuts down the word which it begins,
passes between teenaged streets
that crack at the corners
of disparate ideas
& disperate forms of dress.
If you can hold a dissonant symphony of thoughts
between your skull & jaw & your knocking explosive eardrumbones
you might just be able to
 resist the power of the dis-

It's mechanics are more than that of simple negation,
it's the exponential depreciation of the integrity of syllables.
I always feel sorry for those unlucky enough to follow "dis-",
those trembling alphabetic glyphs,
You're meant to look not at them,
but the rate at which their meaning degrades over time.

This 3-letter prefix
points a spotlight
at the spectacle of words losing their dignity.
Beware.
Casual use of this prefix
may lead to dystopian futures, reality TV, & sever disappointment.

Sexy Spring Poem (drunk edition) 4/23

This spring
the daylight has become a series of chasers.
Hot laughter bubbling up
through the fizz of sunshine.
I am refreshed.
Repeatedly refreshed.

As my skin gathers up its bright red hangover
the sun is drowning like a grapefruit
& the vodka is coming,
certain as the moon
the robust bottles,
they are coming.

The wine will turn your skin-based sunshine
into freckles & brown flaking skin.
Tonight our sheets will be a blizzard of skin
that springtime is shuffling off.

Burns cook off in the night,
like the lilac vodka you soaked out french toast in.
The calendar is widening her eyes.
The horizon has got infinity on its breath.
We duck that florid purpling afterglow
& begin fucking in the blossomed yawn of a cherry tree.

I find you in desperate need of muddling.
You cracked so beautifully
when I poured my intoxicated body over you.

Ladybug

Having spent too long alone in a park,
I extracted a ladybug from my cleavage
It was shuddering spotted and devine.

Drunk at a bus stop last night.

Midnight Strikes me at the corner of icons.
I just wish the bus would come.
& brandish my headphones against the night
and its mouthful of wanderers.
Seattle's needle fingering my eyes
with orange-drunk nostalgia
I imagine the saucer as a wildly disproportionate hamburger,
Its bottom bun is jellyfish lettuce
all held up with a matrix of toothpicks
and in the center
one phosphorescent spine
stabilizes my appetite for combining disparate genres.
Space travel;
Ground beef;
and submarining.

Love Letter to the Beacon Hill Library (If I could I would slip it into their locker!)

Arcing innards,
I am pressing my vision against the exposed beams
and the naked weavework of  your clean unvarnished wood.
I imagine I can smell the belly of a ship,
my eyes leap up and imagine what your form imagines you must be.

You cause stutters and missing syllables in the words I speak for you.
I love being beneath the roof of your pale expansive wordworks.
oh to be a pine weevil in your body of thin, tawny twists & squiggles.
I know it is creepy but I dream it anyway.

For this I am sorry,
and ashamed enough to bend my upcraned neck
back down to where it should be
and burry my face in a book,
looking for some sort of consolation.

Fremont (4/19)

Pink child-sized fingerprints of spring
stick petulant to the small red speed of the Mazda Miata.
The rain will ambush you,
even if you hide your convertible beneath the trees.

What comes to light (4/18)

Don't you love
the way glass looks
when strange light shines through it?

I've always noticed odd refractions of light,
the way the shadow of a fountain dances & seethes.
Like my eyes are giggling
or experiencing some sort of hiccough.

Light is a funny thing.
Don't you wonder what its agenda is?
Why it follows the ethics of science
when deciding what to reveal...

the Dignity of Work (4/17)

Joints sparked nostalgic
by tragedies personal & professional,
My bones keep cracking
with the weight of the words
"the dignity of work".

Dignity,
as I experience it,
is a rectangular number,
in a rectangular box,
on a rectangular piece of paper
waiting in the rectangular mouth of an envelope.


When I hear those words about
work and dignity
I feel my joints like wet gunpowder
My bones detached with edges perforated.

Under this sort of dignity
life becomes a series of
If; then
statements.

Ouch

Today I practiced my best learned habit.
Overzealous concerns
about money and my body
poured together in a dizzying display
of conflict and gore.
My eyelids droop
at the behest of these two uncomfortable neighbors.

Post-biking One-liner

My joints are screaming in a powerful course of the day I conquered.

Freewriting in the Sculpture Park

After turning on the bluetooth
I bend down my neck,
and push the letters like pedals beneath my fingers.

In high afternoon
the sunlight is too violent on the water.
Can't look at it all directly
I need wide-framed sunglasses & sideways glances
I need a toothpick to carve the last of winter from between my wisdom teeth.

I stopped to think a thought
& got lost in the fabric of a swaying dress.

Spring

This spring I am looking to get a sunburn on my neck, have pollen gather in my mouth; I'm looking to grow a flower in my throat. I want steam to rise when I tear my helemt off. Happily, I am becoming more and more comfortable with the damp residue of hillclimbing. I've been selecting layers for sweating in and having youngish, impratical thoughts about casual sex. the kind you have in 7th grade, the ones that made you giggle with shock & lonely embarassment. This spring I am looking forward to the dull ache of pushing my spokes past too many miles. I am ready to soak in the tub for reasons other than warmth. I am ready for my worries to lift away like fat bumble bees. This spring I am looking forawrd to engaging in pains quite delightful.

Two unfinished pieces from class (for 4/11 and for TODAY!)

Chthonic Voice

My voice is in the earth
My voice has demonstrated in laughter and despair
a spelunking depth & vivacity
that would rival the sunken tale of Kubla Khan.

My voice is in the earth.
It's got sound-sensitive skin
like the webbed ears of the bat
that keep its company.
The bats slather screeches
on its chords
my voice is well camouflaged in muck and soil.

My voice is in the earth.
Fallow.
Hibernating the toxins away.
waiting for the weeds of apology to grow themselves away,
waiting for the deprecating syllables to break
& become more usable soil.

My voice is in the earth,
you can use a metal detector
to find the most condensed deposits of meaning.
Dig them up,
wipe away the dirt,
shine them.
Show them to your friends
Tell them your trophy is actually a part of someone's soul.

But that is getting the mythology wrong.
Those are just my favorite collections of elements.
I pooled the sounds there for finding.
So please
I invite you,
hover over me
waiting for detection,
my voice is in the earth.



<3

In the museum of the body
the heart is the most staggering of bio-mechanical marvels.
It's the Mona Lisa of the our soft organ world,
because it is and can so often
be stolen.

Although not the oldest piece in our collection (that would be the digestive tract),
nor the softest (that would be the liver),
nor the most sensitive (that would be the tissue on your lips and genitals),
it is perhaps the most often damaged organ;
the piece of the machine
that is susceptible to the widest array of possible pains inflicted.

It is important to note that because of the high sensitivity
the heart has developed both
marathonish endurance for painful activity
& an incredible resilience seen nowhere else in the body.

The four chambers of the architecture
was designed specifically
so the organ can support itself
when one of its four rooms have been
ravaged,
poisoned,
or
occupied by dangerous intents.
A heart with four intentions will never fold or break,
it can only be bruised.

Gender In My Body (written 4/10)

I am not alway certain what I am.
I wane.
I wax.
I want to be something that is not femme or butch,
but I'm not sure how to build it.
I want to find a beautiful way of being.
I want to articulate all of this beauty in my body
which is so potent
I need to paint with a brush in my mouth.
I am mouthing the colors,
with shapes indistinct and only slightly glyphic,my canvas is giggling wildly green and orange.

I want to be broad shoulders and big squishable tits
I want to be swopping tender sockected hips,
hard curves packed with horsepower,
I want to stride like a cowboy,
I want to stride like a strumpet,
I want to stride like 4th grader on field day
footsteps full of popsicle laughter.

Fuck feminine
fuck masculine.
I am not a tomboy
my gender presentation is squishier that.
I am part freckled farmboy,
part sparkling debutante lips drawn down red and simulating you-know-what.
I want to be a rusty old tomcat
so that when I arch my back and stick my ass in the air
it is a sign of my physical prowess and the relaxed way this body takes up space.


Once someone told me I seemed to be some sort of radical femme-bot
I told them that it was a chassis I could pull off
easily
like a suit jacket or
a skirt with an elastic waistband.

Your Body is Not a Temple

I once had a lover tell me
"Your body is a temple."
He was wrong.
My legs are not pillars
my spine is not a stack of altars
or a series of benches waiting for piled up salvation.
My teeth are not stained glass windows
My body is not storage for the glorified relics of your partron saints
My body's caverns will not tolerate
the crowding of innocent voices.
I am not a house for continual coming and going.

He was wrong.
My body is not a temple.
My body is a religion.
My body is up for interpretation.
My body demands rituals
physical and otherwise.

My body demands that
patellas know the grooves of my name.
My body circulates parables
instead of blood.
Clotted meaning swings my heart harder than church bells.
My body is a collection of unstable elements.
My body is not a temple.

Easter

Let's shoot the moon,
together make a slingshot against the odds,
power ourselves with the flowers exploding,
feed our engines with the pigments deepening.

I harbor the husk of previous seasons
itchy in my throat.
In the spring sighs
begin to lighten
and gather slight harkenings toward melody.

Let's shoot that moon,
break it open its craters
like an egg on the corner of our countertop.
We'll combine our hands into rocket ship algorithms
and take our chances on this most serindipitouds of seasons.

Bathing After a Ride

I am pearling
silt gritty in in the mouth of a mollusk
A tide repeats
washing knee to hip socket
muscles and sinews
hot in the washing water.

Motion

Today I am basking in the idea of sunlight.
Like a theoretical cat
I am learning how to be many places at once
learning to harbor dissonace in the softer parts of my being.
I am jointed together flexibilities untold.

Within the human body there are four kinds of motion possible
bend;
twist;
the same concept polarized by compress and release;
the fourth motion doesn't even have a name
it requires floating bones
kneecaps,
rounded elbow petals,
and pebbles attached to the wrist.

Dreampoem

In the middle of everywhere
you awake
at quarter to 5
birds already dampening down the darkness.

The churning furnace opens it's throat
and belches in harmony with the jet over head.
looping dreams & notions together like a paper chain
words lost with each closing circle,
rounding out softer and softer
until I can't even hear my own breath anymore.

This is a dream
whose name you are already forgetting
hold tight it's non-being to your chest
feel it soften and thump
like thunder trapped a mountain range away

Neighborhoods.

With fingers peeling and a cool breeze winding up my skirt
I scuttle around the unexplored nieghbohoods of Seattle,
pump my pedals in the shadow of I-90
before she skips across the water.
The sun is brash like summer.
I can just about feel the possibility of burn on my skin,
--impossible in so young a spring.
A gust pushes me back
I push the pedals harder
and celebrate my grim I told you so.

The gaps between my sleeves and gloves are still too much to handle
I never trust the weather in Seattle,
it is too safe a topic of conversation.

To keep from chattering nervously
and to keep my mouth warm
I hum, sing, scat a little bicycle song,
still
I am shivering and sweating
like the way your body does while fucking.

Cold and hot take up residnece in seperate territories of my body
there are some neighborhood where the temperatures mesh
and those are the nicest for living in

After I arrive
I look up all the neighborhoods
and let my fingers draw my routes upon them.

yesterday's pantoum (written in class)

4/3
Bearing Witness

Carnage fresh & drying in my mind's eye,
I have borne witness.
My eyes forced canvases for trauma,
I lodge those twinges between my lungs.

I have borne witness,
watched my sister's friends stick their fingers in her heart.
I lodge those twinges between my lungs
and tell her she's better than that.

Watched my sister's friends stick their fingers in her heart,
& whispered to myself "It's a good thing I'm assertive."
& I tell her she's better than that,
making sure the consolation heals on both sides.

& whispering to myself "it's a good thing I'm assertive."
I peel my friend from the arms that caused her rupture,
making sure the consolation heals on both sides
The safety recedes

I try to peel my friend from the arms that caused her rupture,
my eyes forced canvases for trauma,
the safety recedes
carnage fresh & drying in my mind's eye.

Getting a late start on Napowrimo

4/2
I am a constant interruption,
Haltingly my body ride on the hoof beats of apology

If it's not right I'll let you talk over me
because someone once told me
about how oppressive my voice can be
and ever since
my lips flinching has become an intrusion.

I worry about what is expected
not like the old echo
you see
you say

Now I just don't know
when my moment is coming
like to only person at the bus stop
without earbuds & an iphone
I don't know when it is coming.

My body in an interruption
like a ship creaking across an alien sea,
my rib cage groans
& I let the conversation wash
salty & foreign
through the waxy cracks on either side of my skull.

Poised and indistinct,
the rules of conversation
laugh like wind chimes coughing up April
with too much enthusiasm,
as whatever personal anecdote curdles
& the awkward burbles on my belly.


4/1
I watched her
use her elbows as a metronome.