UNTHANK PARK

there was in my childhood a time

when i could not personally accrue debt

and i did not have to steal

to eat and i was not legally a target

and i listened hard even so

many of the talks around me were

missing important pieces.

look the poet is flapping its face

about something no one can see.

when i said i was sick of invisible people,

i meant that i didn't like feeling so attached

to a person on the other side of mountain fences.

this idea has already occurred to me,

the one where i out all my secret meanings

one line at a time, flip their literals up.

when the woman in legends of the fall

cut her hair off in front of me,

i had already had mine removed.

she was staring at the mirror,

but i was searching her eyes for

if this meant i wanted to leave the world, too.

OLD FASHIONED

i'm not so so
at a new time when
lines fork out to eat on
the alter instead of
light my ghost.

today the catch is tackle.
you can see what I mean
floating over the road to
make you swerve.

TUMMIES

hearing my peoples
so sad. MY LOVE
a room after i
sung with concern
in my new language.
i want to pertain and
to be in wind and marvel.
read to me, great span.
without my auger
there are no careful
ways i can find your
speaking layer.
i do as good as
poems spinning me lower,
where this poem is
telling me to climb.
i learned to speak for
i don't know why
the truth that only
had made me a
new people. 

KEEP IT TO YOURSELF

one project: gather the last words of women murdered by the state, counterrevolutionary forces, or their boyfriends. and i guess letterpress them?

another project: there's a place further east in the real midwest that prints their own currency and uses it in a self-made local economy that exists parallel to the other one that rips people's entrails out and ties them to the bottom of the road. do that?

another project: write poems duh.

another project: have a kid with someone who doesn't suck and doesn't mind what people like to call my "contrarian" approach and thinks i'm sexy but never calls me something i think it's stupid to want to be, like beautiful.  mod: adopt a kid with someone... etc.

another project: learn how to operate anonymously would maybe be good.

another project: go to sleep. but i've been writing about going to sleep and melodramatically.

another project: i truly love M.I.A.

CONFUSING RESOURCE CENTER

every one of them talks.
found something about myself this trip:
i want to 'go back'
in even small denominations,
like i want to lay in the cemetery twice.
leading up to my release,
songs that said "you can come back"
held my skeleton up and out,
and upon me a rock, a river,
your country, memorizing this poem off encarta,
memorizing this poem again but the whole length
and saying it to all the strangers in my new shitty high school.

the first month i got paid to work in a school,
it was like 8 schools, and i hated being in secondary.
one reason is: it was the first time i realized that
i'm very very very very slow at becoming whole.

look into your sister's eyes, stupid. look with your brother's face.

come back to the bar where i spilled beer
on one person and bought four beers to compensate.

come back to the top of town and stare at the mountain,
then the buildings that get paid to stare it down.
the rocks, the windiest riverbend on earth, the hiking deaths.

i felt like a swagger in the nines. i rarely feel like a swagger.
i felt somewhere else when i chewed the third oyster.

i want to go back to bed, your country,
and say simply, very simply, with hope,
"i'm sleeping".