Teddy

If after all that— would I knot my tie in the same manner as your Ted?
Take you home, spread your legs, enter the
Split aerial, gold on my fingerprints blood bitten bottom lip
Don’t hesitate to harangue
Enter the place where all your poems come,
Be your mattress, you on top (so much shit they gave us once)
Plumsugahskies lid, lavender ships, my spring break, my circled ink calendar space
Buoyed matter, my little pinkie curled around your auburn tress, sloughed
Skirt blouse, heaped in androgynous dune, corduroy tangled afternoon
Where I tell you shit—
‘Don’t hafta turn the oven on 400 to stick your head in it—
To feel warm inside’- fairy child since he lied, kiss your July forehead
Paint your nails an amethyst blue, dew your tears and wet your hips,
Watch your fingertips come—

would I be like him, though.

Etonian fop, dressed alone, salutary, milk
Your nipples until a bad poem curdles, sully
Sunday alone, tweed, elbow patched, your name
In my jacket, your fluid on my handkerchief
Scent stilllife with a bowl of honey
Salt from my body, your eyes black as
Tacks pinned to that place where you would
Not let me take you.

Where you would not let me take you away.

On Easter Morning 1983 we found the dead body of Superman

Hung off a dead-tooth branch of the balboa tree in our backyard
I remember that it was Sunday morning before Church.
Georgia May had pinned her palm branch from
Sunday School above her headboard, crying after Aunt Glynnis
Told her in between drags to, “Can it with the hosanna’s, alright!”

Grandpa had woken up early to go out and fire
his Remmington at the one-legged whippoorwill
Returning with a red knee high boot cupped in one palm.

Superman’s shirt was inside out.
A pair of crooked spectacles with
Spider web lens lay crippled below his shadow
His body hung swayed and paused
Like the transparent spine of a grandfather’s clock
A ballpark patch of urine drew fleas near his crotch.
Grandpa said that apparently he had used Wonder woman’s lasso
Which led Uncle Karl to momentarily put down his
PBR and make thrusting sounds with his torso.

In a way thinking back on it now, it was kind of funny
The way grandpa angled the ladder against the tree
using his own father’s Cherokee knife to free
Superman’s neck from the jaundice strap.
A listless blue plummeting into the earth.
Georgia May ran around rattling the plastic
Eggs to see which ones contained dimes and
In the evening time, none of us took note
Of the train that whistled past in the distance,
Lugging tufts of smoke on the railroad
Tracks that hadn’t been used

Only Georgia May pointed at the unusual array of Canadian
geese flapping over head
Forming a mathematical greater-than- sign
In their formation headed in a direction
That wasn’t quite South.

Two dredged up prose poems composed Valentines day 1995....

Since I’ve somehow fucked things up with Maggie…

I spend Valentine’s day with Jennene, who I used to go clubbing with five years ago, and who I used to kiss even though Jennene is a flannel clad dyke who’d kick my ass if I ever slipped her the tongue-- Jenenne would only let me kiss the perched hyphen on her face, once, very quickly—after we snuck into the girls’ bathroom at the Red Fox Den and snorted lines of coke off the porcelain bicep of the sink, in front of a rather philosophical rainbow painted above a sad browed mirror proclaiming the Lesbian mantra: I KANT EVEN DRIVE STRAIGHT, we’d chop up powdery caterpillars, inhaling honest sniffs as the grainy olfactory sentences drilled saccharine numbness into nasal canyons and then we’d dance, our hips straddled tightly beneath the stutter and crooked din of the dance floor, chinking long-necks Jennene would stop between cinder shots and tell me that she loves me before our eyes would close at the same exact time—like dual garage doors slowly digesting strafed genitals into the cement palate of wayward loss.



Vespers

We drove home drunk, mistaking the thud for a speed bump until Kirby got out, vomiting a crimson rug near the fuel tank and realized that we had run over something; his bicycle upside down, banana cushioned and wheels oscillating like a spindle; two spoked binoculars grating in dismayed wondering in what direction the wind will whistle.

BOOKSTORE EMPLOYEE BRANDISHES MALLET BEHIND COUNTER
REVEALS IDENTITY OF ROBOT PATRON FALLS IN LOVE

Perhaps it would not be so obvious at first
The corporeal gait of the surrogate human
Ferrying a pagoda of summertime tomes
Between the retail labyrinth of bargain
And Bestsellers strutting with the same
March of middle class uppity
As he fumbles his purchase on the cash wrapt
Oprah’s seal stamped on each of them
Like the Magna Carta of artistic security
Or maybe he treated you
The way patrons often treat menial bookstore
Slaves as if they are manacled to the
Ray guns that scan the merchandise
Nothing more than blinking ATM machines
To barter currency for hazed over sentences
(And how dare you invite them to join
Some sort of a members benefit club!!!)
Even though it is required of you to ask them
When you know they will scowl at you in decline
Even though job security often involves
Placing certain expressing organs and glands
Of our body into Tupperware
While invisible steel hooks
Tug the side of our lips into a smile
Inquiring to the robot patrons if there is anything
We could help them find before annihilating them
Cudgeling them with the investigative mallet you
Told me about when first we met
The tip of the warrior baton
Lanced in his side like a flag
The slot white of his eyes whirling back
Into his skull reminiscent of a casino jackpot
Tendrils of steam streaking from earlobes
In a jet stream of gray smoke
As his ersatz anatomy continues to leak
Coating the manicured carpet with the
Springy coils and greasy gaskets of his intestines
As one final yellow shock snaps
Out near his neck and you know he is gone.

In first grade Cedric Dockery told me
There was a robot inside of him
Miss Heinz didn’t realize I was dyslexic so
We had to stay inside the classroom during recess
Re-working over simple addition
My head unable to discern the numerical scrotum
Between six and nine
Between a lowercase p and a lowercase b
Balloons on a stick
Hovering above the inky cornfields of sentences
Twisted as they entered the innocuous field of
My six year old vision.
Wishing then that I could have been
Tapped over the head with the
Tip of a mallet wand
In an effort to help me perceive what the first added
Elementary sum of what reality was supposed to resemble
Or how a wielding patron annihilating mallet
Would have come in useful
During my own bookstore days ten years ago
The born again middle-aged Christian
Calling me a marketer of the devil
Because we sold playboys and magic the gathering cards
And how he planned on publicly telling
Fellow patrons in the store
That he plans on boycotting us.
How I wish I could have had a mallet
To pry open my lips, informing
Him that most gas stations also sold playboys
And magic the gathering cards and I don’t think
He plans on boycotting them—
Plus we also sold bibles!!!
Or the time I stole a copy of the Kama Sutra
For the woman I thought I wanted to marry
Hoping that it would serve as an accelerator
Switch the limp pistons and gears of our bodies
Feeling as if our flesh itself was coated
In a film of aggregated rust
Hoping that maybe one slight
Movement of combined muscles into flesh
Would reignite something that had long
Since been diminished,
Something that could not be
Put back together again in time
Like a car motor or a snapped serpentine belt
How I wish I had the insight of a smashed
Mallet across my skull then
The carousel of hurt correlating with the
Sockets of loneliness
Under the lid of my chest.

But I couldn’t find a mallet
The vertical weapon of slaughter
Curled in the grip of your palm
Wisps of steam still incinerating
From the guts of the robot carcass
Whose skin you just obliterated
Wondering what would happen
If you hit me over the head
With a mallet
wondering if my heart would
Topple out from my lips
As if you had just placed two
Quarters into the slits of my eyes
Twisting my nose a certain direction
Watching as everything
Inside of my body
Breaks free in front of your eyes.

Babies in avocados

I found it on my way to work this afternoon
Perched on the lip of my doorstep
In a thick brown envelope like the
Abandoned bassinet you always
See placed in front of an orphanage
Christmas morning in movies where
The young superhero reared by nuns
Learns through a series of jump cuts and stilted
Black and white flash backs the elusive
Origins of his past and how I smiled
At first when I saw your name
Picking the package up with two hands
And just holding it for a minute
Remembering how our bodies fit together
How I could hear, audibly hear
The syllable of your every thought
Swelling in your pulse
Your petite neck on my chest
As I held you early that morning
Before you left as I held
The postaged preemie
In my arms before
Opening it as if I were
Trying to unhook
A brassiere for the first time
Excited and curious as to what would
Release itself into my palms
Yet nervous and even a little scared
Watching with awed vision
As the contents availed themselves
An autographed (!!!) novel by Sherman Alexie
(Whose short-story “The Toughest Indian in the World
Is one of my all-time favorites.”)
The mixed CD the first half I’ve
Already listened to during my break
Here at work today,
A copy of Harold and Maude
Your favorite movie which I have never seen
And a letter
—Two letters composed in pencil
Nobody including myself writes
Beautiful letters and sends them via
Mail anymore without logging in a
User name and dotted password first
Unfolding the twin sheaths
Still fresh with the DNA of your
Fingertips and breath
Alphabetical paper ships
Of your words floating across
The white pond of the page
Where you wrote me about your religious periphery
Language kneeling at the altar behind your voice
Where you wrote me about
Yearning and about fear
And about leaving and near the end of the second
Letter you told me to drop you a line if I wanted to have babies
The quote I have never before heard
Embraced in a gray-ripple of penciled
Dashes buoyed with an exclamatory stalk
Walt Whitman’s name standing
On the banks of the quotation
As if the overweight bearded poet himself
Toasted the pear shaped orb up to the sun like a film negative
One morning after bathing
Naked in the Hudson
And found a fetus
Pitted within the center of the fruit
Like a dead Christmas tree ornament
The color of the wood in my apartment since you left
The embryo spending the last trimester
Outgrowing the mother
A seed so lonely for the taste of what once was
Surrounded by a moist placenta of mushy
Wonder wet with joy.

Letter to my Lover

Love,

I never made it to my spiritual vagina. I was
En route Saturday afternoon, the mercurial
engine of my blue Toyota Camry rattling down
The country highway arteries of autumnal

Illinois on a full tank of gas—its owner still
Half-sleep, wizened from work-week and wear
On the soul, harnessing the plastic steer like a
Button or a globe in front of him, two packs of

Smokes and a Venti coffee stowed in the passenger’s
Throne where once you sat next to me just three
Saturday’s before we drove into the sun that blissful
Afternoon I dumped my heart out for you like a

Carafe of memories for you to sip on and from which
You drank (can still intensely feel the curve
And syllables and alphabetical shapes your lips made
Over the faucet of my heart from that day)

Your Copper—the tangible token—a solidified
Tear licked from the upsidedown
Ocean of your heart stashed in my front right pocket
The copper, culled from your own northern

Superior spiritual nest, the pulsating eternal token
A green on-line ajar-eyelid keyhole to
The mysterious joy of my beloveds’ heart—an introit
To the conversation of lips and longings the

Tango of universal souls separate yet solidified. My
Last sojourn to Matheisson Grace had foundered
Outside the town of Lacon with the mechanical organs
Of my vehicle foundering like the transient

Interior orbs of the human body, leaving me stranded
Out of reach from my wooded creative uterus—
And your smile (always with me) As I drove,
Wending my vehicle over dips and valleys

The weather was pushing sixty, yet overcast
Beautiful gray continents of clouds
Cobbled the atmosphere in a ceiling like
British Tea occluded even a treacle of orange light—

There was the woods between the worlds and there
Was my car and there was a desolate road
Sliced between the skeletal brown brush
Strokes of the trees I followed inexplicably the

Wounded arm of the Illinois river to my right
abandoned, my orientation guided now by
the navigating tug and reel of the atlas inside
My chest, the atlas that pulls me into long drives

In autumn madly chasing, madly smoking, madly
Frisking my soul for meaning dashing after
The Last ashy dregs of sun spilling out on the
Earth in a blister of gold and tears.

Oh love, I was lost yet I was driving, content
In a zone out dream state, not giving a
Fuck about the discourse of my sojourn, visually
Enamored by the sight of a sunken

Red brow barn slouched and lonely, fields
Clipped yet a two-day harvested no shave
Gruff semblance connoted to the land—following
In love with the sight of a two story country house

Swallowed on all sides by land and thick sky—
I drove, as fast as I could, smoking
Lost, past a hamlet, into the swerves of
Hills and inclines and steady slopes when

I noticed a vehicle tailing my rear bumper—
The vehicle blue, reminding me of the
Car you drove around MN-St.Paul last august
The night you tottered and balanced with

The acrobatic finesse of an angel tottered
Sedate on my lap before we cruised home,
Lost in the syncopated chimes of Depeche mode my
Fingers lost in the veil of your hair not wanting

To let go of creature situated next to me. That car was the same
Blue as the one you were ferrying that night
August last, behind me as I was lost, and I thought it was indeed
You in the vehicle for a moment

The editions of Rumi and Leaves of Grass both
Tucked in my back dashboard— both
Editions pregnant with fallen leaves from the
Picnic table the morning after you left

Finding the expired kisses of cigarette butts, creases of our bodies
Still imbedded in the mattress of earth from
That day. I let the vehicle pass me and it gunned ahead

Myself, turning on a road I had never ventured down
Before, Myself still lost in the gray autumnal
Overcoat of the afternoon amidst barns and silos

And Trees pregnant with fairy tales, driving a
Different route then the vehicle I thought
Contained your smile—only to find that vehicle,
(speeding) behind me once again, as if it had chosen

Me, as If the vehicle were beacon leading the
Front of my car into nocturnal vistas
A dalliance of dreams, the rich lathered soil of night
Fused in front of me past shires and dirt roads

As I followed only to find it shooting ahead, swerving
Into a large house with a fence and yard
(front newly refurbished) a bouquet of thicket and
woods between the worlds on all sides

I knew as I past it that I had seen this house before
That I had lived in the house once perhaps
Before—for it was the house from the dream we
Shared—at least the front of it matched my

Dream from earlier in the week and the vehicle I had allowed
To navigate pulled into the driveway and waited
A white arm extending from the drivers side—waited
For me to pull into my dream world and

Discern the inside of what it was I had driven so long to find.