Fever Dream

You could write a Russian novel
About the things that might have happened
If I'd just turned round
Your face is an open book
I never got around to reading
Put on the spot in the middle of your
Porch
I can't determine your meanings

You told me once
crowded inside a booth you don't have to understand it to mean it,
You winked an eye and for a moment I thought I saw your freckles connect
In some  familiar constellation
Slid your menu and a gaze
At me wishing I could throw a gaze like that (I got brave)
I went for your hand instead
Your grasp, every strand of your hair felt like a revelation
I joked we didn't need words we were better and cooler than all of them
And I didn’t know then, but I know it now

(We could have said it with our spoons

 and (cut though the) knives and pools of syrup left behind)
I never knew there was enough to ask for more

Why I'm at your door smoking through the past like a fever dream
Wishing for all the things,
Caught in an imaginary crowd,
where your hand slips from mine,

in the dark you keep playing the light-switch I can never find

/There’s nothing inside my sleeves

But my own recycled imaginings/

every nights a recurring scene
/ Suicide plots are tangled in my sheets
My teeth are falling out /
tragedy’s
being born with arms much too short for a girl like you
Sometimes I go on,
there aren't enough sad songs on the radio,  because every now and then it has to be morning

Even if I open my eyes
I can never seem to reach you

Library Search Engine Poem

The explosive child

explosive earth

Explosive eighteen

Explosive power and strength;

the magic of the white city

Unrelated Poems

1.

I wish I was a conjurer

I’d close my eyes and

Make you reappear in

Mirrored infinities

And how strange it is

To long for other places

Like others long for home.

2.

I was born a tree planted

In a strip mall parking lot,

a place that isn’t cool

to go to anymore,

where the windows are

Papered over, vacant eyes

Advertising nothing maybe 

you've been there

Late at night

 Exchanged bills or kisses

 in the shadow of a dented

El Camino  I live

in a empty

parking lot

to nowhere.

I have no legs,

Just roots.

I study weird things about you,
like the way the hem of your pants hit the top of your shoes

NYE II

Don't the neighbors know
premature firecrackers read
like a mistake? Midnight fireworks
sound like a firing squad alone in
my bed, and for a brief moment
I can't distinguish the two.

By morning drugstores have cleared red and green lights
that once invaded late October aisles and afterwards,
like it never happened
all to make room for pink plastic and foil wrapped hearts;
On my street, a Christmas inflatable Mickey Mouse lies
deflated in one of the yards like a disappointment or
a discarded lover.

to the boy at the microphone

Mouths like yours make a cigarette look
good when the lights are bright
it feels for a chorus or two, like you see me
but I imagine you don't

lists of insults or compliments: you look better from faraway

television has taught me to love any stranger with a familiar face.

lyrics and poems

This morning, dreamt I had no hands, just sleeves.
and you were holding some thin thread, there,
twisting a story around your fingers
 and pulling my arms apart


When I awoke, I didn't quite feel unraveled
just folded up like a sweater in your case,
I felt warm, I looked down
and my hands were red mittens

I said, I might be falling.
you told me no,
There was no use,

let's not let our love become a stitched pillow poem


I felt worn, you'd strung me up now,
hung on the back of your door,

You watched as I became the words in my mouth and a mass of wet tangled threads

then left the room.
I reached out
grasping at anything, the hem of your pants
shoelaces, belt loops,
 but I had no hands to hold on.