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".

ANGRY DOING

already attempting
to paint poems
like goya going deaf.
people singing threats
all the way from
the hidden side of the hill.
with my face i make
a scary goya.
i say
i don't want to get much older.
when i drive
i feel like the driver
of my childhood car
smashing everything.
i'm so good at
tiny demolition.
saying
"I HATE YOU"
over and over in an email
with the words
"i'm sleeping weird".
i don't hate you
loosely steering
my behaviors
like a combo
of good sweats
queueing up
hormonal responses.
every young man
in this building
is attractive and
it's putting me
to sleep,
in the sense that
i want to die.
by luck,
i read adrienne rich
telling her lover and me
that our hands are fit
to carry out the violence
to end violence,
and it causes me
to shake and
step back out of traffic.

ALL FLOWS OUT

in a noisy, i just look away.

needing advice for my coward

born with bruised wrists

because i was eating at them.

i don’t know the word twisting

when it does. i said 27/34

words of the poem my right mind

knows, and CLEAR IS MY SOUL

AND ALL THAT IS NOT MY SOUL.

to sleep is punishment.

eating is nice but

hunger is punishment.

i try for five days what took him

quite some years to live with.

i cut a lime the wrong way

only once. i cut it every day.

clear is my sensitive belly button

and the skin on my fattest parts

getting cold first.

because of chemical jewelry in my blood,

i have wanted to name a baby

since wednesday morning.

BECAUSE PAUL CELAN

over the evening paint 

of the first bulb's segmentation, 

a late husk, evermorning pigment 

separating from the plane of skin 

and not facing a barricade when it 

skims inways toward the lakebed.

it takes a second for my tactile feed 

to become audible, asking why 

has the yolk in you stayed whole 

all this time that clicks against it, 

threatening it, making me from below 

a lousy mouth hanging open in wait.