I have an answer for your question and its to get the fuck out of here.

Dear Buk,
where have I left you?

I have turned life
into crudeness
because
I have need of you.

Dear Buk,
why have you left me?

my pages are made of rice
and I have need of you.

I'm no more your mother than the wind.

I'm no more your mother than the cloud that distils a mirror - Sylvia Plath, Morning Song

I watch you across the pond. You sit cross-legged peering at leaves as they fall, feeling the wind tearing pieces off you. You are coloured just like them - yellow, orange, and red. You're crumbling just like them but you'll live and they'll be dead.

You'll want me to glue leaves to you, yellow, orange, and red but don't forget they'll brown, and crinkle to the ground, and you'll be naked.

I'd like to move but you may hear me, and I don't want to see the boulder where you're sitting without you. You sit cross-legged counting leaves. I'm at forty three. I could fill you with leaves, I could watch you for days, and then I could cross the pond and wash you with its water, if you think you'd like it.

You don't know it but there are fish there, fluttering underneath the crust of leaves, swimming just below the surface. I bought them from the pet store, thirty four in all, just for you. Goldfish. I think you'd look beautiful in skin like theirs. They'll die soon, they do not belong here. Not like you. I could remove the scales one by one and paste them to your epidermis. Your skin would shine like the sun.

The ground is damp and if you let me, I could roll mud across your body. I'd leave only your eyes free, so I could watch them move, counting leaves. You imagine they are torn by the wind but it is their time to fall.

I imagine how you feel with the boulder underneath you, cracking against your bum bones each time you exhale. You are so thin now. The boulder will be sand soon, and then it will be soft, but not like you. You'll stay hard as you stare, wishing the colour, to stay in its time to go.

When you are gone, I'll move rocks, the largest I can carry. Rearrange them in the creek, watching always the boulder where you'll perch when you return. When you come back here, the tree will be naked, and you'll blink your eyes and sigh. I'll crumple browned leaves and glue the pieces one by one to your body, starting with your back so you can stare straight as one or two last leaves fall to the ground. You'll crinkle your eyes, not sure if you feel. I'll fill you back with crumpled leaves. It will take patience for both of us. You'll sigh about lost colour, upset that there wasn't more time.

I'll watch you as you go, find the place you've chosen to nestle. I'll gather dandelions, rip each petal (so delicate a word for weeds, I know, but I'll save them). I'll colour your body as you sleep. Paste tiny petals to your skin, starting with your toes, up your legs and depending how long you nap, right up to your nose. Then, when you wake you'll see colour. I'll watch you from my spot in the trees, so glad to see your eyes crinkle. It will be glee but you won't know it.

You'll go back to the pond and stare at the tree, shocked there is no colour. But you'll be the one with the colour in the forest. You don't know how to cry but the pond will be your tears, and you'll shudder as it ripples. By then the goldfish will be on the surface, and you'll exhale so strong, watching their bodies float upright, willing yourself to be more like them or the leaves.

I peer at you across the pond. You sit cross-legged watching scarlet leaves float across the sky before they rest on the ground. Sometimes one flutters from sight and you think, freedom, but I see them touch down. You can't imagine they would ever brown. They are red like food-things, those tiny miscellaneous bulbs you rest your fingers on when you walk, sometimes, through the forest. I don't know who eats them but something does. Delicious things you've never tried. Of course, they are red like blood but they are too dry to run through your veins. They belong to the trees.

Freedom, you think, freedom. The leaves may be dying but they have more freedom than you do. The trees thin and so do you. I'll watch your body as it moves. I'll gather turkey leaves. You'll not have eaten the meat but you'll find comfort in their feathers.

Nameless Man with his Hands on Her Legs

mangos
melons

maggots.

motos
moto drivers
moto driver

wrap your hands around my waist
no she will not

your picnic is dirt
maggots

no picnic with you
won't smoke your

cigarettes

so lost
(we should really go out)

i am losing.
there are no trees
no leaves,
and the city
cannot read my soul.

and the concrete space
that i have for a patio,
is so small.

and the air
that i want,
is so far from this place.

i am here because my heart was rested,
my body restless

remember me as the leaves change
imagine me
so i exist where you are.

Relapse

They say that relapses for alcoholics occur every
for marijuana users every
for hallucinogine users every
for prescription medication users every

for poets every
and for lovers

There are many ways to write poems
and there are many reasons as well,
sometimes it is to perserve memories,
to add to them to make them better,
other times it is to make fantasies into some version of reality,
even if it is sick or twisted or sad

One way
to write poems

is to sit quiet and breathe in the rage
that is brewing inside you
and let it escape even though
it might humiliate you


There are many things that make me miss you
There are many things that make me remember you existed
even though I push the image of you
as far
into
my
throat
and as deep
into
my
stomach
as
you
will
go,
And sometimes I notice the rage of you -

Coffee reheated
Tea bags in cool water
Fake tans, heat rashes,
Burns that pull your face taut
You singing in the car,
Cans of Carling and the way you taught me
to twist and crush them

every minute, the spectacle of the world astonishes me; it is so comic that I cannot understand how literature would expect to cope with it.

- Czeslaw Milosz

Stunning Gray

After all this,
still there is an issue
to confront.

Still an issue
that seeps
into who I am.

I want sustenance
and suddenly
you come from air.

After all this
there are times
that sticks form walls
in front of eyes.

Legs so thin
mine quiver.

dear love dream in a stolen scene,
do you impart all you once hoped for her to me
including long journies across countries,
impressions of hunched shoulders straightening?
do you ever wonder if this young sun will burn
out before your heart has a chance to heal?
or do your new dreams include the mere
intoxication of your body?

the bay moving to the right with trees

now that i'm young
i've come to believe
in the islands and the trees
and the breaking sound of knees,

and recently that love
isn't always
such a tease
though that might be
what it seems.

now that i'm young,
and the sky is full of glee,
the tickling sound of wind
feels like my outward seams.

now that i'm younger
and my luck feels almost done,
i believe in seams, and the seems,
and the islands and the trees,
and how the bay feels like my knees.

the inside of my mouth
has become a ball gown

Keep it if you catch it

The poet dies.

Buk suggests killing the fish,
by first removing it's eyes,
and then it's fins
(for precaution, in case
it should attempt to swim).
Dear Buk,
the fish was dead when I removed it
from the water.
I would prefer one by one then,
to kill it's soul by removing it's scales,
but wouldn't that take long,
aren't there too many pieces?
A fish cannot have less than
three thousand scales.
Oh, but kill it, Buk said.
What if I prefer to let it free
without any record of ever having
held it in my hands?

How many eyes does your heart have?

He asks her:
How many eyes does your heart have?

She answers: One.
But what she really means is:
My heart has as many eyes
as the oldest birch
in the forest.

And sometimes, when other trees
get tangled at my roots and grow
against my heart's life,
My heart grows many more eyes.

He asks her:
How many eyes does your heart have?

She answers: One.

He, on her poetry decides

she,

on poetry decides
birch - tree - fires

(her pages don't look
quite like birch
enough).


she,

on poetry decides
peel - back - bark

(her skin doesn't feel
quite like birch
enough).


she,

on poetry decides
skin - white - eyed

(her skin doesn't feel
quite like paper).

Maybe we should start with what we're afraid to write...

- Sandra McPherson

Crush

Give me back my ornament, she says.
He picks at her like straw hearts and black stones
And she eyes him like he’s a studio shoot for Valentine’s Day.
He doesn’t know she wrote the script.
He scribbles out the word love,
The word that is the loudest,
And hands it to her and tells her to read:
Red wheels, cock bone.
Her eye skirts around the blacked out word.
She trades him wallets for tickets to her sold out show.
He tells her she looks like an arrow that’s been shot
Down a cement highway and has skidded into the ground.
He tells her she’ll have less luck learning to sing,
Than finding any pink in the corn field.
She watches as her heart turns into a beetle,
First he picks the black stones and rearranges them to be the beetle’s eyes
And all of its arms,
And then he takes the straw and rolls it into a circle
To be the beetle’s body. She says,
How dare you take my parts off here?
He blushes slightly, his knees quiver, he waivers as though there is a strong wind,
And then he sings a song:
Red wheels, cock bone.
She feels the bricks underneath her collide as she stumbles home,
Whispering good night to the orange moon and purple sky,
Listening to the crushed as it whispers, goodbye.

Quiet

Dear quiet,
you are so soon come,
not long ago were you filled
with pockets of heartbeats
and cheekbones.
Dear stillness,
I see peacocks and pants,
and patterns,
in the sky you offer me.
I do not question why you are here,
I am thankful for thee.

Dear birdcry,
Dear Nature's battles, how you
frighten me,
return me to my convinced thoughts
that your battles
are from an outside world you
cannot conquer.
Dear skycry,
you move me to think that the
quiet is not alone,
that still there is a buzz of
noise and feeling
and that quiet is not so still.

A Piece of Pure Sugar

wind flies through coloured paper
and I take this world
and make it real.
so, the colours float on book covers,
on small lumps of sugar and sand
from my eyes to the air.
you've built a mountain where you're sitting
but only if the red brick rolls.
this is wrong because he would say
you were fucking the dog.
the wind fucks the eyes,
the heart, the mind.
dogs never smelt like sugar, candy
wind-licks before.
we don't own a dog, my heart cries.
the wild flowers pamper themselves
with small pursings,
the wind blows their scent over
to the deck
where the coloured books and patterns,
paper, thoughts, and
crayons full of sugar, wait
to unleash back into the sky.

Twinkle-tear

other than my addictions,
I'm elated.
she sees it,
tells me it.
she always said I had to give them up
and hit my all-time lows,
or I would never reach my high.
I'm on a high.
she sees it, she knows it,
she is grateful for it,
this small piece of the outside world,
this one last anchor.
right now I'm smoking king-size,
b&h
and my eyes sparkle.
she knows it, and it makes her smile,
even though she cannot connect
me to our chain of ancestors
anymore
than the other four hundred and fifty days before.

Don't Look for the Sky

i want a pen, that's all i want
something to scratch onto paper,
besides my skin,
in place for my brain
since it cannot be removed
from my head.

there are things to be said
that i want to be read
but my hand is just dead
with no pen.

Fowl

For The Mews

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by yearning
Thin over-greedy self-conscious
Strutting through campus streets at dawn showing off
The proof of their opportunity
Status symbol-minded posers burning for green eyes
Wasting space in the jog of their minds
Who targeted and embellished and dumb eyed and bored spend time
Sedating creativity with intoxicated waters and flashes
Wasting desire on imitating idols
Who without any capacity to know why they buy or
On any plain night why the world cries is full of lies
What their ignorance and greed press further away
Who pass through their libraries and parks filled with trees
Without any true sense of what the world needs or the potential
Their glory may feed