Poor Dog

finally, at some point you're sitting in a room
with a bolstered, crass old man and he says to you,
"you're so fucking lost, it's a joke,
you'll never escape and if you're not careful,
you'll let them eat you.
they will continue to laugh at your stink
if don't start sneering more at them, or join them.
there are pictures of gods dancing on your fucking walls,
and you can't dance. there are stone rubbings in your bathroom
but they, fool, are not stone rubbings
because, as they'll tell you, that became illegal before you were born.
there are pictures of people on your walls that you consider to be key fragments
of your tired and nearly broken-down soul, and they don't even like you.
look -
here is a picture of your young-skinned, yellow-toothed mom,
here is a picture of your drunkenness,
here is a picture of the cigarettes,
here is a picture of your poorness,
here is a picture of your slobishness,
here is a picture of a man living gleefully between four very weak walls.
here is a scar from when you ran into a cement wall.
that's the only thing that isn't real. the only thing unsmellable.
here is a picture of the lust that didn't help,
and there is a picture of the love that will not save."

or maybe he'll say, after spitting out his whiskey on the ground,
"fuck, kid. there was a second there I thought I liked you."

A Portrait of the Young Woman Going Mad

The portraits we have of this artist, are photographs.
These photographs were taken (somewhere)
and were developed by the artist
herself. Only photographs.
Modern attempts to capture young woman's
nature are weighed down with
truth-like details (realities - insanity is a different type
of reality). The inability to sketch out what is not (important).
Portraits, only some of the time are apt at capturing madness.

The photographs you will see are infiltrated with descriptions
of the artist losing her mind. Some may attribute this madness
to lack of nutrition. Some may attribute it to an affliction
(intoxicated, starved, starving, desperate pain in her limbs
caused by a block of blood flow to her brain). If you look closely,
you can see. If you were to meet her (somewhere), you'd never ask.
You'd just look back at the photograph.

This artist's madness was in her hair. Her portrait was kept in a room
with precious treasures from land of the Orient.
If I were to take her portrait I'd do it in oils (given there existed money,
skill, time) Only a camera was available at this time.
A good artist steals (has been stolen, is stolen -
sometimes by reality, sometimes by the realities)
A good portrait of a woman or a woman going mad steals
(what you see is not truth, it is madness). Steal from her
that which was at one time and is at once.
Kill the moments that stole from her the right to be
so mind boggling insane. Her insanity is so.

She is not mad in all of these photographs. As you will see,
she is only mad in some. Losing the mind is a gradual process.
You will find that some of these portraits are slightly ambiguous.
You will have to decide for yourself when her mind goes.

Cock-heavy underneath things ---

You stumble into the room cow-heavy. I'm sure if this were a different time, I'd stick my head in the oven for you while you continued hanging your cock out of towels.
I hang out of my nightgown. That's my towel. I try to think past dizzy, night-screams.

Girls love getting fucked.
Stop talking to me, I'm randy.
Fuck you, you fucking cunt.
I can't think straight.
You could sit straight.
No.

I smoked a cigarette earlier. I know you can smell it. The heat, it doesn't let these smells escape us. Forty degree plus, in the second week of June. I know what it does to the stink, I've been down the street on garbage day, watching old ladies sort trash. I've been to your room.

Get closer; look me in the teeth,
vinatab-stained and crooked.

I'm reading and trying to write and I can see your cock rising. You're a strange breed, hopefully a poet.

Maybe when you're back from the gym,
I'll have found the reason I want you.
Maybe I'll be cleaner then;
Maybe I won't inadvertently say something abrupt, or suggestive, or awkward;
Maybe I won't guiltily think of that small cock I accidentally latched onto during my holiday from your drunken, dick-mouthed, slim-panted bed;
Maybe I won't barge into your room when you're sleeping next to that tree trunk of a baroness;

Won't breathe in the heat
of your dirty-underweared new bedroom.

You are a strange Scottish man with bug eyes and muscly arms. I think you're a beauty even though your beauty is all covered in grime. You're fucking twisted, looking up derogatory terms for every minority on the continents you've traveled but when we came up to lesbian, all you could think of was slut.

You can do better than that.
I'm going to break this fucking jar and eat your pickles.
Enjoy the glass as it cuts your throat.

I'd like to sit with you for hours, chugging back shots of the black label
you encouraged me to take more litres of.

Don't even think about drinking my whisky while I'm gone.
I need it to loosen me up so I can slander the world,
and then tell you that I'm absolutely partial to trees
and would never let you catch me near a fucking oven,
even if this country offered them to daily filth like you and I.

Coffee with Condensed Milk and Cigarettes

there's a sparrow in my head
somewhere
telling me
come home.

wouldn't that life be as brown
as his feathers?

exhaust fume headache,
she sighs.

she has three big pins in her head
and she is wondering about all of them.

one sits tightly behind her left ear,
digging into her neck.
one sits parallel to the downward cringe
of her right eyebrow,
just near her her hairline.
the last, between her eyes.

she does not know
how they got there,
but she is stacking the clues:

the empty field;
the men in matching clothes;
the imposed regime of rice.

(she makes weapons out of things now,
she once used as tools).

she takes each tiny
piece of rice

and glues it
carefully -
carefully,

over the scar
she got from straw.

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.