Contents:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3


1

i make soup in my garage
out of dirt, quarter-inch washers,
and the tiny, green worms with black heads and yellow guts
who live on the bark of the tree in my front yard,
and i stir it with a stick i’ve turned into a spear
by rubbing it back and forth on a concrete curb.

i wonder why,
after my bike slipped out from under me
on the ice in front of brittany thompson’s house,
she laughed through her sliding glass side door.
the worm guts between my first finger and thumb
smell like plant juice and taste just like –
no! i never tasted them!

why would brittany thompson laugh?
it doesn’t matter as much now except
i’m still a little boy at eleven
and her thighs are getting bigger.
the growing apple of her calf taunts me,
as the white-light reflecting pylon
of her shin compels me to look .

another day, morning, in my room –
i peek down at my shoes,
bring my eyes up a moment before my head,
as if it were only possible to see those people who
suddenly appear to witness our acts of vanity
if we catch them by surprise,
before they have a chance to disappear again,
smooth one side of my shirt with one hand
and the other side with the other,
expand my stomach hands and all
in preparation for a backbend,
once performed i crown with a raising of my head,
a raising of my arms in a blood-wakening stretch
up and out into a bending of my elbows,
until the first knuckle of each fist
finds a socket to rub out the sleep.

eyes closed –
neon orange lattice then black,
so that i can’t quite see her
as i ask to stay home from school.

in bed all smells are my own,
and fabric softener.
in bed comfort is only ever
a roll and a tug or a tuck away.
the sun cannot penetrate my pull-down shade.
linoleum and heels from the kitchen
mean all that love can,
which is to say –
i will return.

sleep for a while in love’s belief –
mom’s and my sunny sick day cabal.

what good has waking up really ever brought me?
once it did save me from having to eat an organic
veggie burger with a quarter-sized patch of
closely shaven hair on the outer perimeter of the upper bun,
which when i refused to eat,
a fellow patron accused me of having a closed mind.
maybe, but i couldn’t see a reason in the world
for a burger of any type to have hair anywhere.
was this zoomed-in-on flyflesh –
this prickly half of a velcro fastener
appealing to some?
if my salvation depends on ingesting hairy bread...
i attempted to explain this position to my fellow patron,
who would have, judging by the look in his eyes,
shoved one of these hair burgers down my throat
(i realized at this point that he must have some
vested interest in these burgers up to and probably
including a key role in the shaving process)
had i not opened my eyes.

i opened my eyes.
kendra was there.
i did my best to explain all of this
and then listen to her reaction,
but it was early and my dreams
were not finished with me –

leaping from car to car –
a pane of glass not to be broken –
a bundled form lying on a grate –
apparently frozen stiff –
the fact is, neither dead nor alive,
he performs his duty as always –
with no opinion on the subject.

if you were to remove his left shoe,
you would find the beginnings of a zipper.
pull that zipper to his neck and you
would be able to hinge his now sliced body open,
revealing a ladder leading into the seemingly
bottomless hole of his bowels.

lower one foot after the other
and then one hand after the other,
not forgetting to pull bruno shut with
the gut-caked handle on the inside of his belly.
the landing will become more and more apparent
as you descend thanks to a faint light
issuing from a passageway of which the landing,
you find upon reaching it,
becomes the launch.

here you could invoke anything you like.
for instance, you might vibrate the words –
the body and the blood of the lamb.
the dread answer, like tumblers falling in turn
into an immense barrel, would sound,
stomping up the hallway,
multiplying the echoes of the previous
with the clack of the next,
until having collected into
a mess of resounding force,
there is nowhere the sound is not.
then upon catching up with itself,
in this instance,
might utter in converging stages –
well…something ominous, i’m sure.

the uncertain moment of transition,
wherein even wrecking balls must hang still,
comes too suddenly,
leaving silence to report
the terrible implications beyond sound.

i’m on my elbows.
a burning nine a.m. urges
my dangling head to the left,
where propped like a sphinx
i sip from your warmed calf.
we are positioned as opposite
halves poking out the same
end of a quilt and one
of us is sleeping.

almost imperceptible hairs
of a never-shaved, soft length
delicately widow’s peak down
the center of your hamstring,
dying out before the shallow-pink
valley of your knee back.

this fuzz doesn’t vanish
into the dark of my shadow,
as it might if i were looking
at it with my eyes,
but grows longer
against my sweeping nose,
and i pull it out further
with my lips.
what is the other kind of love? –
i want to ask your body.

i want to help these sad hairs
into a vacant crevice of skin,
to see them thicken and curl
in the presence of a dank sweat.
i want to flatten them out
with the side of my hand
and stir their acrid smell
from the tangle with my knuckles.
i want to eat all your body
is capable of and swallow
the piquancy down whole.

i want to contort with your sleeping limbs
and ride the wave of waking-tangled
exhilaration straight through the mattress,
bedsprings, into the grimy floor slats.

black screen
and now (as the bed is halved)
siamese twins (naked us knotted)
born of separate mothers (grappling)
in different states (sweating)
charting a way back (panting)
to a shared destiny!!!
**applause**

or should we break apart on impact,
inventing an entirely new performance in the process,
involving our buttered bodies and hardwood floor,
and should that spectacle attract attention
from the above once known to us as depth,
let us continue to glide about,
pushing off the four walls in random turn,
springing our knees this time, cocking our elbows for the next,
unconcerned with any third dimensional audiences,
suspended, propped, floating, or otherwise,
whose sideways desire to belong might prompt them,
at a careless glance up from our floor,
to unbuckle and drop smiling to a breakneck end,
or who might simply return the glance
with slight but provocative interest,
at which we could forget ourselves
naked, greased, and married to the floor,
stand up and attempt to scale the divide.

you see,
i will eventually have to contend with
gavin’s reading –

okay, the last card.
the card in the position of your ultimate fate
(the queen of swords),
is a court card and is therefore
a person and not a specific outcome.
that is,
your fate is not so much in your hands,
but in someone else’s.
here it goes –
a sad woman who has known acute loss,
but keeps it all together and who is just,
holds the key to your fate.
the roses are significant.
look for this woman in connection with roses.

has she come and gone?
have i missed her?
my world is full of roses,
even if they are imaginary.
they can be eyed and picked like real,
and petted all the same.
they occupy me and argue with me
and fill up the seconds of my life.

did she come while i was sleeping?
was she dressed like the tooth fairy,
who incidentally dresses exactly like
chiquita banana (or so i’ve always thought)?
did my queen of swords plant
her seed in lieu of a quarter once,
and after a long gestation period,
will my teeth fall out to make room for
the sprouting buds of our children?
am i destined to be the mother of
a new breed of pixy – the father?
the king of the tooth fairies, gavin?
had i known you as a child,
and assuming you could have developed
your seeing powers to an adequate degree early-on,
so as to have provided me with a basis for my conjecture,
and such that it would have coincided
with the loss of my baby teeth
and the subsequent visits of my betrothed,
what defense could i have hoped to mount
against the tooth fairy’s arsenal of magic dusts,
with which she can appear and disappear, turn invisible,
and induce sleep on any boy or girl she likes?
not to mention her fellow vagabond of the night,
who would have come clicking and shrieking
straight from his corner of hell to throw sand in my eyes
had i dared to remain awake one second past midnight
in order to defend myself against
the questionable advances of the tooth fairy.

if this should happen over the weekend,
and though you and a friend
may have exhausted your energy
doing battle in the bathroom with bloody mary,
remember –
you need only invoke
the sandman sabbath clause
in order to have a good laugh –

the sandman will remain apart from his duties,
upon the turning of friday into saturday,
and, rightly, saturday into sunday,
and not pepper the eyeballs of the wakeful,
lest he forget his day of liberation
from that icy prison in the core of pluto,
and be forced thereby to pepper
his own eyeballs as a fitting reminder.

it is because i know these things that i must tell you,
or be like some lackey of the sandman,
obscuring your vision with my dust,
singing songs to lull you into a sleep,
instead of offering sound advice on how to stay awake.
there is one song worth singing before moving on.
to the tune of “sailing, sailing”
we go –

diving, diving into the ocean blue,
there’s many a fish we’ve scared away,
on that you will agree.
diving, diving into the deep blue sea,
with flippers and mask and oxygen gas,
we’ll have an adventure true!

down,
swallow down,
all of it down,
bring it down low,
all the way down,
past the bottom of your stomach,
all the way into a ball-bearing,
dense as is painfully possible,
past where pain once dictated limit,
even further now,
down,
all the way into the very
bottom of the swallow.
retract your limbs and head –
forget them altogether.
now, concentrate on retracting your trunk.
ignore any suggestive odors
issuing from what had been your crotch
before your legs disappeared –
penetration, including self,
is no longer acceptable.
narrow your apertures into focus,
reign-in any leftover feelers,
and knot your grabbers into beaters.
blink but do not wink.
scrape the hair from your cooling body
and ready yourself –
the day of featured reason is near –
the taming of hope at hand!

tonight we are to be honored –
we who have placed ourselves beyond joy.
tomorrow we erect buildings of brick.
tonight we mix the mortar in clenched guts,
we who have stomached it all.
tomorrow we make soup.

i slip off my bike
on the ice in front of brittany thompson’s house,
and she laughs through her sliding glass side door.
i stand up, and opening my mouth,
spew dirt, quarter-inch washers,
and the tiny green worms with black heads and yellow guts
onto the ice in front of me,
but remembering i have no legs,
fall back down into the pool of steaming puke,
mashing it to slush with the heaving attempts
of my trunk to forget itself.

my head must not have entirely vanished yet –
i can still hear something,
more scream-like now,
and see brittany thompson’s thighs
growing bigger as she runs to and then straddles
the stump of my body.

i observe the up-close toe of a black boot,
moving up and around in a wave,
hiding a delicate white instep with taut leather vamp,
and finally realize –
can it be? –
what it’s comprised of –
the tanned eyelid of some terrible ebony creature
who offers up body parts as sacrifice to a cruel mistress!
in exchange for the mere pleasure of staring forever
at part of himself hugging that feminine point,
fitted so nicely into its glove and sweating,
as if it wanted nothing more than to be set free
to splay pink, damp, and slightly swollen on a gym floor,
and there to bound about in dance or volleyball,
smacking the song of the giant’s joy
into his ears,
even after his eyes –
foy me larnses! –
be raisins.

how can i compete?
my eyelids will be gone soon.
i close one at a time.

solid orange with red lightening bolt veins.
then it’s black as midnight and the sandman’s not here.
twelve a.m. with no tooth fairy.
yesterday has gone and taken kendra with it.
a new day and brittany thompson was never mine.

the number one,
without a doubt,
most important rule –
never admit,
to yourself or anyone else,
that you are,
ever have been,
or anticipate being,
alone.


2

if i had appreciated
what a stunning woman
my mother was
as i came out of her body,
i would’ve blushed.
had i been informed
of her delicacy beforehand
(initiated to the fact in-utero)
through amniotic impressions or
a series of placental lectures,
had she gently tapped the message
while caressing my growing form
through her own,
and if i could’ve touched her hand
or seen her face from the inside,
i would’ve gladly stayed put
and saved us both the pain.

my foresight is increasing
even as i write this.
i see my horizontal body
projected onto the wall
directly in front of my desk –
i’m alone in the vision
(prophets are by nature inconstant –
i apologize).
no, now someone else has appeared with
tweed blazer, upright posture, and yellow pad.
his pen-in-hand poised in thought
breaks free.

i track the ball of that pen
transferring its ink to paper,
scratching furiously rightward,
as if, pressed hard enough,
it would leave behind an explanation
in chicken scratch a foot high
(no more fooling around with maybe –
my name’s across the top!) –
a psychological evaluation
(furiously rightward!)
like this –

...which leads to why
the patient feels tormented
by the ghost of his own afterbirth,
and in what way –
the answer hiding between any number
of conscious and unconscious factors,
memories both suppressed and elevated,
a world view founded on reality in part,
unfounded in equal measure,
and uniformly confounded throughout...

the rain outside is coming too hard –
my portentous mural is flooded with interference.
the doctor’s pen is now
a fidgety black lightening bolt,
barely perceivable under the static clutter,
dancing from corner to corner of the wall,
prescribing a full bottle of what seems to be
maximum-strength abandonment.

all i can do is wait around
for my future to clear up.
i wait.
i spot some dust in the corner
and take care of it.
i scoot my chair around and try to relax.
the rain continues.

i stand up and walk out of my room
there’s nothing going on
in the next room either.
i can’t think of a single thing to describe.
the floor isn’t dirty.
there isn’t a sound to be heard.
i don’t feel trapped by the walls.
i don’t feel like anything.
the dish drainer is empty,
except for a spatula,
but that doesn’t suggest anything to me.
nobody walks through the door,
they don’t jump up and down,
go into a harangue and run upstairs,
and their smell doesn’t remind me
of smoking a cigarette in a field
that reminds me of a field by a runway,
where i stood with a friend
talking until dawn,
resolving nothing,
because that also never happened.

the pounding on my roof lightens to taps.
i run back into my room
to see if the reception has improved.
it has.

my future analyst must have taken a break
during the brief downpour –
the report continues along the same track,
not far from where it entered the fog –

...approximately one week ago,
the patient began to note
a significant increase in the number
of pregnant women he encountered
throughout his daily activities.
he now believes this increase to be an illusion.
when asked why he felt it to be illusory
and not simply coincidental,
the patient replied to the effect
that not only was the number
of pregnancies improbably high,
but that women he had seen only days before,
who showed absolutely no signs of being pregnant,
were suddenly in their last trimester,
persons he previously thought to be men
were being thrown baby showers,
and that even his toaster seemed to be
getting rather bulbous around the middle.

it is possible that this so-called illusion
can be traced to the patient’s guilt
at having caused his mother discomfort in childbirth,
and that this sudden and extreme obsession
with all things pregnant is the continuation
of a dialogue believed by the patient
to have begun in his mother’s womb –
a conversation cut short
by the event of his own birth,
in direct defiance of advice
received therein from his placenta
that he should remain unborn.

within the span of a thunder clap,
my chart is no longer
spread across the wall,
but through my mind,
where it all becomes familiar.

into the passageway –
session number three –
hypnosis.
begin playback three minutes fifty-three seconds.
conversation between patient and uterine furnishing.

no answer,
and so, too,
the uncertain moment of transition,
after which firecrackers have
decided to explode or fizzle,
does not arrive –
cannot report anything –
only reflects through its absence
a throbbing past slinking at
the future through my chest.

into the passageway –
please tell me.
nothing - sound is gone.
i’m sorry.
the same.
into the passageway –
i should’ve stayed.
it has to move or one of us will shatter.
i’m sorry.
the key breaks loose –
KALOONK!

i walk down the passageway
into a large, well-lit room.
consider –

the six by two or so front door,
a central hanging chandelier with five conical
shades wrapped around five candles,
a pot-bellied stove in the corner,
almost directly underneath one of four windows,
partially obscured by the stove’s flue,
a rear door mirroring the front,
a rug,
a kitchen table with two chairs,
couch and end tables – all,
individually and collaboratively,
through personal dimension and/or relative positioning,
hinting at an origin, seeming to make analogous
through shade, size, and parallax,
for example –
the amount of tabletop in shadow
and a certain month, day, and year on which
a woman or man may have been born,
the number of steam holes on the bottom of an
electric iron and something about tooth-decay,
heat emanating from the stove and a first date,
a purple and black meat pancake
(a gigantic placenta) sitting at the table and me,
as i stand in front of a quickly closing portal,
surveying the room.
the pancake offers me a seat.

utterly afraid that anything
i might say after sitting down
would not make the entire amount
of sense necessary to keep this
already tenuous scene from
dimming and flipping onto its side,
like a dream snowballing into nightmare
the second you realize what it is,
i look down and,
toeing at an imaginary mark on the floor,
leave behind an actual scuff
with the tip of my shoe.

i lift my eyes and head together,
attempting to intercept the meat’s attention,
before it reaches the visible evidence
(just rubbed into the floor)
of my tightened and confused nerves,
but realizing it has no eyes to rest
on nerves – tight or loose,
or the product of either,
ease those nerves from around
my outwardly-focused attention,
enough to allow for a moment
of inner-confirmation that this is all
perfectly normal and progressing as it should.
i cannot convince myself of that.

i’m reminded of a long night i spent
two years ago at a relative’s house.
lying there in the guest bedroom,
how could i know, until it was too late,
that the scratching i heard was not
coming from the attic, but a monstrous,
and i’m assuming, trans-dimensional rat,
as big and every bit as slick as a seal –
dying in its world and being born through
a rift floating mid-air in my room?

lucky for me, it caught sight of the mirror, first –
the residual play of its own history, perhaps,
across the cold surface of its glossy, black eyes –
the infinite and exponentially confusing reflection
of those eyes off a mirror, and vice versa,
and the resulting fractal of smeared memory,
in which the rat may have seen its dead mother
riding a once white stallion through a torrent of blood,
or some such perversion of its alternate reality,
was enough to awaken a doubt within the beast that
all was assuredly not normal or progressing as it should.
this second of doubt became a second too long –
if the rat had any intentions of staying, that is.
the portal gave a wheeze and then blinked out.
the rat must have set its coordinates for elsewhere,
because i never saw it again.

anyway, i’m digressing the doctor tells me
(that’s your main problem).
he will now count back from ten.
the room will disappear on one, placenta and all.
it might work i think, but the rain picks up –
drowning the count at three.



3

a letter to myself:
dear me –
we are alone.
why continue? –
there is no out.
haven’t we learned? –
all attempts to escape
must be met with penalty,
which is to say…
and i say it softly –
despair.

give up.
we have no choice.
punishment must be enacted
by our self, upon our self –
before the others have a chance –
we cannot be abandoned
if we leave first.
stop writing.
thank you for my attention,
and in advance for our
imminent cooperation.
yours truly,
(signed)
you

gavin and i were sailors –
mechanics in the navy.
we lived in an old house on a bay.
when my hopes died,
he tried to revive them.
along with my ultimate fate,
gavin offered further insight –

love is what drives you,
obviously in life,
and as reflected in the cards.
you follow your heart to a fault.
if i had read the cards earlier,
i would say stop,
take a breath,
and think with a cool head for a minute,
but i see it’s a little late.
still, keep it in mind.

blades are coming
out of the environment.
burdens for you.
wounds.
there were more than a few cards
from the suit of swords in the spread.
grit your teeth.
steel yourself for the pain.
a good bit of it will come
from people you know.

your hopes are the purest imaginable.
you seek the reclamation of your spirit.
don’t forget why you are doing this.
hang on to that.

i remember the context
of that prophecy so clearly! –
and though it’s a point
of interest worth recounting,
the past is played out for now,
and it’s time for something fresh.
i can only hope
that the last voice i hear
will not be my own.

today i woke up calm
as i can ever remember being.
my body was limber
and my mind was lucid.
everything was alright.
even confusion was an adventure –
the pink sock in my drawer?
the toaster was looking trim,
and when it caught fire…
i didn’t stress out.
i was determined to remain
in that blissful state –
i am determined
as i walk outside,
take a deep breath of cool air,
and empty what i can in an exhale.

the atmosphere is crisp,
but it does not cut me –
it’s new –
there are no angles as of yet.
i make myself a promise –
a promise to maintain –

i refuse to call anything good today
that i cannot personally trace
to a physical or mental nascency –
back to sane, simple structures.

should any of my ideas rebel –
unexpectedly morph into a donut,
suddenly grow an extra head out of context,
or a mouthful of warheads instead of teeth,
or start jabbering some nonsense language at me,
we’ll have to part ways –
those things are not in the foundational
spirit of the day.

and if i’ve attracted more than one
of those singular notions to myself by that time,
and if there is another among them who finds
sympathy with sprouting heads or babbling silos,
or if they should all conspire to mislead –
one or all, they can join the rogue along a different path.

as for me, i’m sick of it –
i’d rather go alone and thoughtless today,
than get tangled up with phantasms.

i call the tracing good because it seems vital,
along with elementals and instinct.
dictionaries are good, and maps –
they’re the tracing about to happen –
and clear, wakeful thoughts.
what’s in front of me –
what’s around me –

tree branches encrusted –
an entire tree glassed behind frozen drips –
sun duplicated at the terminus of every branch,
the tip of every twig and the sag of every drop –
hundreds of thousands of times –
an entire row of them lining the street –
majesty and awe in record succession.

i ask the street
what feels like an appropriate question –
is all of this the first day,
or are we approaching the end?
are the red doors forgotten,
or have they been freshly painted?
or is this the second day?
if so, is it the same as the first?
if not, why has it changed, and how?
but if so, why is it the same?
or is all of this the third day,
or any day after –
except the final day?
will the final day resemble the first?
what is beginning or what are we doing
or what is ending or what have we done?
there’s not a street alive that can tell me,
or alive at all –
not today.

i round the corner
and see a group of lonely people
meeting outside the church add-on for brunch.
they speak with the cemetery clarity of headstones –
ninety-nine point almost all of it left out –
beloved or mother tightly chipped into granite.
i imagine the smell inside the building –
that foot and paint smell of all add-ons,
annexes and elementary school classrooms.
i turn into the alley beside the church,
where i find a homeless man lying on a grate.

there’s a cough –
louder –
a tiny but tempestuous clearing and a darkening
louder-
a hacking song piggybacked on poisonous burps
from center stage the wine-stained lawn of bruno’s mug –
raw, like the morning you wake up to face
some destiny you’ve concocted –
louder –
i can’t seem to escape
louder still –

i hear it in a word –
the hopes of heaven
in the name of heaven,
but i tell you –
heaven means nothing
if it is only a name,
and will remain hidden
until its foundation is poured.

consider your own selves first.
are you merely the sum
of a few letters?
which one then is your head?
how do you spell your toes?

still, you are, and i tell you
that you do have a name –
a true name,
and as surely as the kingdom exists,
you are no more or less than that name.
no monikers or variant spellings
can endure beyond the gates –
there you will be known by your actions.

if any man have ears to hear,
let him first reach up
with his hands and touch them,
and then, knowing that he is real,
let him hear the sound of his life.

blessed are they that hear,
and how completely horrible for those! –
for now you must answer.
seeing what is while knowing what should be –
the discrepancy of hell.

your plight can be likened to that
of a slug covered half in salt –
the more you struggle, the worse it becomes.

give what is required and keep the rest.
feel neither fortunate nor unfortunate,
but always as the ever-settling average of you –
mid-cursed, or all else will be delusion.

or, if it be in your nature to dream,
and in that dream you hear a name,
break away from your deliquescence,
roll sideways off your pyre,
and experience the necessary death
required of those who would become
a raindrop falling to the ground,
where before there had been but
a slug melting on a leaf –
a person searching,
like everyone else,
and as such,
not entirely alone.

November 2003 – March 2005