eucalyptus.

1. the drunken pendulum of these trees in the wind
is something without intelligence. It's of the body or
of the supernatural. A home under a tongue, a trance
devoured into the marrow where there is not one inch of doubt
uncovered.

2. four servant women
have their hair loose after dinner
like pheasants balancing upon freckled necks
leaning towards each other
with crooked elbows
and knees that are skinned pink and shell
these women gather beneath the rounded
hunch of this lead mountain each night
its spine bowing at their dirty feet.

first song ever.

Truth in Our House

D A
Father you are so blind
G
your on the brink
G D
of loosing your mind.

D A
I am, I am so sad
G
I'm on the brink
G D
of going mad

"
Brother you are so small
your on the brink
of changing it all

"
mother you are so faded
your on the brink
of getting jaded

**
G D
And i am, calling us out (2)
C G D
Cuz we need some truth in this house (2)

"
Father you are so white
we can tell that
those knuckles are tight
"
I am, I am so red
I think it
it was something you said
"
Brother you are so blue
it makes me wonder
how you do
"
Mother you are so black
Sometimes i wish
you wouldnt turn back

**
G D
And I am calling us out (2)
C G D
Cuz we need some truth in this house (2)

did you know that I edit these poems after I post them?

Yep, I look these bodies over and i change them all the time.

It's a phenomenon that only now I am starting to pay attention to. I am staring in the face of a poet's addiction. Tension, tightly strung rope, each fiber a rifle. Poets are like those trainers on reality TV who are just down straight disgusted by flabby, lazy bodies. I am also asking some cream curdle bodies to work out eight hours a day, sometimes more. I am holding up their drunken skin, close up to the TV screen, the skin that will get tucked away by stitch and knife. I am performing plastic surgery, except without plastic. Just desperation and compulsive vision. I am sewing up the muscles and sometimes even rolfng them into place. I am the sweaty doctor's eye that can see your perfection, sweet little poem. I can see how you almost ring out like 10, 000 bells on key (minutes before snow), (and never under water). I can see how you almost are about to make your wings finally work. I can see how with a few tweaks i am going to make electrons cause fire in a glass. I can almost ask the rock to stop in mid air--I saw it wait before it hit the beach. I guess this is a an apology of sorts. I know how unhealthy it is the way I watch you in your virtual and paper houses. I know you feel like subjects of an experiment. Staring into your the windows. Trying to see how long you can stand on one foot. Or how well you plan christmas for the family. I know you feel me hovering over your reading shoulder. Over your cutting carrots. I am trying to gauge how perfect you are. What can I say? You are so close, it makes iodine stem cells in a petri dish somewhere quiver up a smile of worth. Maybe tonight, instead of showing off your ponytail and coy gestures, you might invite me in for dinner and let me measure your ankles?

long time tweenie

we humans have no sense of time
i mean, we haven't developed the bell curve


for the map of aging
how you grow
and learn how to manage mortality
become a better person
that can number things in order

until the line starts to curve in on itself
and then we are teenagers for the rest of our lives.

pubescent little terds
but with babies who need us to keep things racked.
and house paint
that comes with electric bills
all those garages for our crap


we must be afraid of it


I have epoch in my day alone.
time for flame
for fathom
for the pot to boil
for plant to sit or swing
time for laziness
so much time for that
time for vanity
time for tightening up
time for worry scramble
and time for avoidance
some voids
clearly caked by bad food choice
and online television.

time to read three thousand pages of
trashy novel
to go with the door open.
pray quiet and curse loud
time for dingy music over paper


to prepare time like chicken stock
getting thicker over the minute
sweet salted butter of day
would break you all out in hives.

the way to words, is to read.

for sarah; for lindsey.

trumpet of july night
is how i feel about our love affair
that has slowly started to belong to us
like possessions you keep in boxes
you hide them
because they remind you of a time
before now
something you can examine and make peace with.

thats where i am holding you
against me, pressed up
sternum to sternum
like a fence.
i am holding you so tightly
but away from here
in the second growth
after winter
but before now.

now is like being pressed up against
the glass
the breath against sand
causing
immediate claustrophobia
and blindness.

when i feel that i love you
i am not telling you here, now.
i am telling you before
when your hair was different
and your hands swept my body
like ink in water.
spreading out like wind over salt
when everything you said
i believed in and kissed.
and hung up in my doorways.

wimpy lonely

i don't want to forget this loneliness;
this bone absence of sound
i want to remember this anxiety
of piecing together the seconds of a day
making enough racket in the kitchen
to overwhelm the fact that
no voice has yet been raised.








yesterday i pulled the hair out of the drain
and it was only one color.
when we lived together,
my twiggy net of gopher hair
always had a corona of
corn husk silk, now
that was a union.

to be an american, edited.

I always give advice on things
that I don’t know anything about.
I only know things that will make a person miserable
and actually don’t know much about what makes things glow.
(I don’t know why I do that;
I really don’t know anything about poetry
or anthing about ethics
the outdoors,
or healthy diets.)



I don’t leave the house anymore,
because my house has become the only real company
I love.




I feel the soft walls curling their Michelangelo
stone palms with the fat square tips
they are gently scooping up the bed, which is empty raft of lights
and the Christmas lights that are not evenly
hung around the door, and hang like fats in some places
each have an egg raising
a story of an innocent bird inside.
the smell of spices and hot food just cooked
and plates that sit under suds and tomato water
making purple coal rings that stay forever
in the porcelain sink
and the heavenly lights under their paper lampshades
the burnt guitar always ready
round faced
gold thin teeth
to play its brawny bourbon sound with tin cans kicked




she made me feel so alone,
even though she was my teacher.
she made me feel small and hard
& cold, a sad line in a barcode
or something even more obscene
like ignorance and boring ideas
she made me feel embarrassed
& confused, like I had used a word wrong
at the table, and everyone knew that I had been
faking that I know things.
but she had thin arms like my mother,
kind of flaky like hers,
and she had on this watch
of my mother when I was still in my odepus phase
(when told her I was in love with her and stroked her triangle face.)
those thin arms, with the anorexic wrist
with the deerskin pearl that sticks out,
and she was rubbing her own arm the way my mother did
rolling up the same silver band with
the dime glass face
up to her drying clay elbow.
I adored her then
and I felt like she could love me.
because she has the same arms as my mother
with the same sliding watch


to be American is to be lonely
so I make these dream stories of village people
who don’t know what lonely is.
(and its another thing i know nothing about,
and i only want them to exist,
to balance out the american in me)

So I’ve given them faces
with homes and sons and
gossip.
I’ve given them warm nights with stars
and heat beside chill

their communal duties
with the disappearing space of joy
I imagine
this woman
with bundled pounds of hair
and marine eyes
these big new york cheese cakes
I imagine
her sitting on her stoop
in the dirt
watching children in baggy clothes
kick a muddy ball around
ricocheting precariously upon potholes
occupied with tan soup water
sometimes almost hitting the baby
in the face.
there is a real sense of commotion here
with bodies and movement
and wind.
but she is quiet and still
she knows why things are &
who she belongs;
everything is remembered in
the lines in between the skin of the village
written with blood
and heard in the wilderness
which still exists there
and she doesn’t have to figure out anything.
figuring things out, isn’t what life is about.



to be American is to be a stranger
but you can still remember a time when the check-out-lady
would tell your about her nights with boxed wine and tv shows
or when they didn’t need to check your ID
when people waited for you to cross the street
and when it was easy to have people over in your home
to play music and share a meal that looked like
it was cooked in sections.
when art didn’t mean anything
and your talk didn’t mean anything.
Being an American means you can remember this
when you were a part of something
but now no one remembers you.