Stretching

I miss the colors of your bedsheets wrinkled in the bends of you

Whenever I lounge around on pajama bottom days

I miss the way your torso hands the conversation

Over to your thighs

Whenever I walk miles with heavy backpacks

In directions that are not toward you

I hear you brushing your teeth in my dreams

But I wake to find myself much further from your bathroom

Than across the hall

Still I throw the backpack to the ground

And stretch my legs

Brush my teeth

And slip into bed

Knowing that every once in a while

I will slip perfectly into your complimentary

Curves and bends

Agreeing with your body

And soak up moments to miss

2:25 am

I cannot write a poem high

I said

I’ve never been able to

But I lied for the sake of argument

Which is something I try not to do

And I know I shouldn’t

But I do

And you should know this.

I know my truths are safe here though

You said you don’t trust

Art born of intoxication

My mind is recovering

And stopping slowly

The many years I’ve passed

Worth of intoxications

Brain dead highs and lows so bitter

I freeze cheeks just to think

Searching for highs in wrong things

Not even drugs

Binge eating weekends and lies to my parents

Skipped agendas and responsibilities hidden away from

Like ass-up ostrich immaturity

And I worry myself asleep

Most off-days

Wondering if my time has come to go or go ahead

Slip on a K-Mart vest and gain a special blue glow

Or sell it, pawn it, hitch it, suck it, and sue it all the way to the

Big leagues

Recently I started searching for answers in a chair

Without sugar or video games for a week

Just to see if I could stop crying

And throwing fits

And maybe start cleaning up my pencil box

And sharing with the other kids

But there was always a difference between hearing my father say ‘throw you into the deep end’

And him actually throwing me

Wait for me to decide

Before your decision

And your chances of a contact high

Soar to Petty concert comparisons

Luna

As I stand tired at my sink

Washing the night sky

The twinkles of fork prongs

And curves of little dippers

Extend themselves as for me to get a handle

On the night sky

But as I approach the moon plate dish

I realize I cannot

I wax and wain and circle the

Full bright orb

Getting nowhere with the stains

The stars and fork prongs

See that I'm distracted

The rush of nighttime post-shower

Pre-sleep soft skin sheet kiss

Leaves a stare and a freeze

I am breathless

Powerless to the night sky

The dippers float back to heaven

The stars ride soap bubbles away

And the dish

Runs away

With the moon

Elixir

I’ll tell you why I chose the elixir

Given my choices

I’ll explain to you every bit of what you need to know

And even previews of what you want to know

I will spill out newspaper clippings and tell-all novels

From the collapsing sopping wet cardboard edges of my hover ville

A gun to set my pace

Traipsing through early morning sunrises

In turkey neck flannel and budding raw masculine sexuality

Patches of stubble

Stink of changing hormones and nervous urges creeping

I could have used my gun with the men

As the winter morning gas station Marlboros and day old reheated coffee no creams

Invited me to take the four-wheeler out

And shoot

I chose to run from the truth about weapons

That weapons killing are only half of their issue

Weapons, more importantly, give the shooter a choice

And I never wanted to be given that choice

Do not burden my ATV shocks to carry that weight back to the campgrounds

My gender sent me a basic postcard to come play in the early morning fields of

Choosing the final chapters of whatever was in sport

My dickmates asked me early on to decide if what I had was a weapon

And I swallowed the inevitable fate of a terrorizing childhood social dilemma

To stand proud with no weapon but a favor

Request

An empathetic extension

But never a pain

I was offered once a noose

Woven so completely for me

Convenient and martyred with fray only where dramatic

Scores of enthusiasts inside of a world we all see everyday

Contribute to everyday

Live in everyday

Share everyday

But never really physically enter

Interweb Media System Communications

Anyway, scores of them

Carefully downloading and extracting the contents of a custom fit noose

There are many reasons to offer someone a noose

Each of them carefully crafted boxes with lines drawn on the inside

And instructions where to stand written backwards

On the sides that are off limits

Come inside where the rain cannot seep into your make-up eyes

Raccoon eyes are out! Hello?

Enjoy the ideas but never the desires

Step to the side and fill out the form

We’ll let you know what its your turn

Eyes on your own personalized paper

And while you wait

We’ll be fitting you for your noose

I was never one to read

No point in lying

So I stayed in the lobby with a noose

And hormone circumstantial blues

Until some friends of mine saw me in the window

And I saw no reason not to leave for a bit

I had time for a cigarette anyway

I didn’t bring my noose

With me

Then one morning I woke

And found on my nightstand

Well, almost knocked over on my nightstand

Because I am not a morning kind of person

This little elixir not tall enough to be poppers

With Alice in Wonderland labels

Fuck the Dumb Shit

And

Seriously

Now I walk into rooms full of nooses

Watch men shoot deer from the schoolhouse windows

And wait for my next weapon of choice

Be it ninja star catty wit claws tossed by angry gay men

Like ultimate Frisbee in the quad

Or dumbed flat and insistently rough armor shields from aged enlightenment seekers

I watch and weigh my options

And the weight of my load

Because life is far to heavy

Carrying too many weapons

Besides

I need to maneuver with ease

I am still wandering hallways and shores

Trying to find out what exactly constitutes

The dumb shit

Major

I keep dehydrating myself

Because it’s good to need something

Other than poetry

You know what you need,

Poet

You know what you need is overstatements

And understatements

Not bank statements

It seems as though what you thought you in fact needed

Will sadly bring you no more than you have

How wonderful would it have been

In the event

Of this American capitalist (stay with me)

Truce and agree-ance actually holding more than noodles

But soup

It is a lie, however

And it seems these dreams of yachts and custom made clothing

Implied wealth waving invisible from the concrete as though

It is assumed rather than created

Are never fully realized any more than a Rom-Com

Montage makeover

Because time and reality clutter this world

Void of utopian basics

Bogged down by the truth

And the humidity

My god the humidity

Reminding summer days they are alive but not all well

But I was raised in a swamp

Jumped from my lily pad

Flew through the air

And landed in another boggy balmy humid swamp

I can take the humidity

And you know you are more than okay with it, Poet

You know you love those overstated saber-toothed giant woolly

Painfully real brutal truth-tastic nastinesses

The nights filled with tears and screams and whinny complaints

Set to unfortunate realities

And tasks at hand

You complain about the humidity

But you love being shirtless because of it, Poet

You love your insistent candor and fistfuls of wit

So perhaps dreams of arid dry heats out west

And safely tangible disposable hearty suburban kitchen islands

Filled with junk mail and credit card statements

Are in fact not at all what you really want,

Poet

Perhaps the ugly, bitter, sweaty, whoreish, brash, brazen, seductive

Seedy, underbelly truth

Is that you need something no one else in this world needs

Other than poets

To suck barnacles from the underside of life’s biggest great whites

And scream in joy at the amazing ride zipping through thirsty under currents

For the bargain price of lamentation

Everything for the sake of study

The study of sciences

And arts

But mostly just vain arrogant selfish needs

How dirty a little truth to discover, Poet

But you need rough whisky shot purging animal noise sweat stained

Craziness

It’s perhaps the only explanation you can understand

And the only thing you can fully explain

Slice

I am sick of these poems

This demographics warfare

Night after night

Mic after mic

Across the country

Labels collected and struggles hoarded

In the battle of 'who's more repressed?'

But before you rush the stage

With hisses and fruits

Hear why my poem is that of the ugly kind

I am sick of these poems

As I am sick with these poems

Each of them bargaining with empathy

And playing to a crowd

With an optimistic faith in common sense

And humanity

And each of the perfectly placed punctuations

Begs for a slice of my heart

Directly proportional in size

To the amount of disparities and demographics

I have no choice but to give into them

As each poetry lives to tell a story

Of pain and longevity

Waiting in line to a room full of heart butchers

Ready at their slicers

Only one voice could possibly be missing

The voice of the room

Whole and unified

Fighting sighs and indifferences

Giving way to a struggle cliche-d into the

Hippie term 'revolution'

Fuck it.

Call it what you will

But it's not Armageddon

It's simply the poets Collecting our Works

To understand the level of empathy we

All seek in others

Is too in ourselves

The underlying passion is an adventure

Seeker with a hound dog scent of camaraderie

I am sick with these poems

My own tally-marked demographic novels in tow

Bring to me what I'll bring to you

Immigrants helping rape victims

Children of abuse racing for the cure

Inner-city victims of the deepest strands of racist tensions

Plowing through the rover-red-rover lines of language barriers

Gay feminist vegan Pagan naturalists

Devoting more time to the halt of genital mutilation abroad

Than they do to their own PETA-driven causes

The penniless building monuments

To the women who got the vote

See each other

As the poem in your hand

And heal the sick

with

these poems.

The Gambler

And so at least I know

It's me

That is feeling, climbing, explaining

Circumstance and indecision aside

I am this now

There are givens given

And hypotheticals discussed

At the seminar of 'What Next?'

Oddly placed in Vegas

Gambling and affirmations aside

I am standing, smoking, looking

At all the tables of play

Knowing it's me

Who has a very clear decision to make

To take over as Showgirl

With the deepest positive affirmations

My titty tassels can elicit

As I strip down to strip down

I realize, life is null and void

N/A

The sigh of relief is comparable to Katrina winds

And my stage name is born

There are no answers

What is-s

What was-s

And what will be-s

But no right or wrongs

No answers

Just questions

And I stop yelling at the microphone

Stop blowing dice like my life depends on it

And start shaking my fringe

And showing off a new look of pretentiousness

Because I wonder why people are attracted to men that treat them like shit

Not because I know they are

Swinging tea-bag insults in your bifocals

And thumping to the mirrored disco balls

As multi-faceted

And reflective

As any given noun or situation

One can imagine

Too smart for your own good

Thinking yourself dumb

Breathing

Smoking

Staring

Asking

Giving the disappointments and teases

And picking money off the stage like third world

Toddlers pick trash from land fills

Why?

Good question.

What does anyone lower himself?

Is it because we are raised to see our standards gleaming

High atop the landfills and mountains of history books

Pages screaming of struggles for indignance

And the very concept of a standard of living

Eat pac man gulps of our existence

For life

And the assumption that we all lower ourselves

Just to bend over to the ground

I know my dressing room standards

But life is hardly ever back stage

Its down center

And the lights will rise

When the horse races are over.

So I ask the lights

My questions

And gladly stretch

For my next bends to the floor.