to live inside you

1.

i cant live inside a person

feel their internal temperatures on my face

or brush their tissues through my fingers

when i'm dead

i'll shrink myself

and make a temporary shelter inside the goo

pick up stones

look into the back of your brain

they way i look to the sky now

to feel my tiny mortality

or to ask for help.

2.

drop the sack of potatoes on the floor

pinch a child

drop my change down the drain

hold in a goggle breath for a while

blow it into a loose necked bottle

throw the breath bottle in with the laundry

watch the whites and the green become a fin

jump through ice

and wave off my beliefs like a dog

hot skin no skin

1.

        The heat is needed

        So we can know our bodies

        Unfiltered hang of an arm

        I watch the skin of it

        adapt like an animal in it’s new climate

        wrapped like a basket

2.

        unweave this DNA

        wag open the boxed bird

       set it out in random weather

        our house lifted off its feet

        somewhere  in the middle

        the femurs in Kansas

 still sticking out like the vultures had stayed.

        no bees

        only open wood hive left

        waiting for its first feast of rain

        the stomach of this city will now look like

        a leopard field of dark cavities

        all blood drained

        a trail wet orange peels left on the grass

I don't like it.

I said that i didn't like poetry, and I meant it; I don't. I probably won't like my children very much either. not the way they crowd up the living room, even with their limbs tucked in like unformed wings, their ribs like the spines of music books. They will still take up to much room--with their loud minds and their tiny pieces of cheap toys all over the floor like a galaxy of colored cups and corners. I won't like how they will ask me so many questions and not be able to know when I'm too tired for even any words at all. I won't like them I won't like poetry. But I cant stop coming back to writing it (it may not be any different than addiction) I cant stop forgetting how much it annoys me. I just keep doing it because its the only idea that I have to do. It's the only place that my river of moving threads will pour into.  And I imagine this is how I will love my children. That they are all of me, all I have to know this world, comparable to our meager five senses. They will be the only thing I have to be myself. I guess that 's the thing about poetry is that it reminds me too much of life. It gets under my skin in the same way. Just like in life where there are no straight answers, and sometimes it so disappointing you wish you could give up on it. But you never give up on it. What is with that? You can't give away the thing that wraps you in grief the way a coroner wraps up blue bodies in the unbreathable plastic sheet. The easy answer would be that it's because its also the thing that fills up the mouth and the eyes with things that could make stars birth litters of star puppies in all different colors and sizes pulsing together  like a mice heart symphony. We just can't give up on the craving for sweet plantains, or miles so long of green water horizon like a bowl the size of all our dreams stacked up, or our bodies so immaculate with the mass and shape of a leg, or the tiniest prick of a vein, cells moving like a sea of bullet fish all together with light flicking them in unison. I cant give up on that, just like you can't. Even if I don't like it. Only when I'm ready to die, and let everything fall out from me will I give up on my first children. Only when I can't expand with the giant breath of poetry flinging me about like a tight skinned rainbow striped beach ball will I ever give up on it.