somewhither

all I can write now are poems made of cringe, too basic to make lovely. poems of over and over: I am hurting. I am hurting. I am hurting.

she picks out the perfect ear of corn. holds it up for me to see, peeling back the husk to look for rot. this is our sunday, and her hands circle my lower back in simple rings. i kiss her on the shoulder and think: this is our wedding day. she picks out the perfect ear of corn like she could have done for the rest of our lives. holding it up for me to see, there is no rot to find. no decay in us, only terrible, murderous youth. in her husking hands i see our lives sprawled out like mountain ranges, two separate Everests, only begun to be shucked. i know from her gardening hands this will be our only sunday. she picks out th

my love is chameleon sometimes when it must change shape to survive. afraid it may kill itself in its sleep--so sharp, so demanding. sometimes it becomes softer, rounder simply to survive itself. sometimes it doesn't do to be so murderous. now i ask my love to go to sleep instead. please don't change your shape to slip out from under your grief. please, curl up with your dagger teeth, and breathe deep until you don't feel the winter anymore. better dream than dead. better still than gone. i have never been one for hibernation, no, but i would give much to keep you. to preserve you, a sleeper encased in ice, and in doing so save m

limbs like tree trunks, silver birches powerful rippling--i could be that softly combing breeze if you would let me. what would it be to grip those reaching roots, struck deep into soil, earthiness, sun-stuff. what would it be, i am wondering and when you catch me looking i try to seem sincere: just for science. mere curiosity, but look here at the hot arching fever, the way i rise up like a stove top, i want, i want, i want. i go to bed hungry, and wake up the same. heart full, hands cruel and quenchless and your thighs: o god, mountain ranges. i want to climb them. my hands cry, give me canyons. give me give. my body te

right now i am waiting for my life to begin. i imagine it will approach with the slow clicking of stilettos down a dim hallway, clickety clack, hooves roaring down cobblestone, chest heaving with lust and lung. i imagine this but truly i have no idea what life sounds like. sometimes i hear it, i think, in the pulling of the engine down the highway, the relentless Morse of a heartbeat, and the ocean, punishing always that wincing shore. sometimes i participate in this fierceness of living, giving and taking with the rest. other times, i listen and pretend it is enough. it counts. and i sit with my legs crossed, closed, while the

the summer, counting down. each morning means less meat, fewer kisses open mouthed, and a choked leaving looming ugly and wolfish like a death. i am trying so hard to love you in the present. i know you are not a bomb or a landmine, i know you are not going to kill me on purpose. still, the soft humidity of your breathing: murder. the freckles bouncing in your shoulders: ruin. i am run through with the soft suggestion of your heart within your chest, feathered and flickering. a candle, a precious fire. the beat of it is my own brutal beating; you are my quiet bloodshed, my gentle misery. i walk this home you have built so slow in

slick, slick, slick. the salted yolk of the sun, the sea, singing yes, yes, yes. and i think to myself: could i have arrived at a better place than this? the Vitamin C and D state, place of slow freckling, marshed breath like diving, climbing, pulling back every skin to find the nutrients beneath. shoes and shirts, no service. and the sun always, always sweating, panting to keep itself cool enough to stick around. slick, slick, slick skin burning from the inside, smelling like a sweetness, shedding itself and forgetting what it was called before this, this, home of breezes and punctual rains, home of homecomings, though i am new as

If you were a boy, she said one day with her hands drawn like shades and her eyes glinting like a secret, If you were a boy i would love nothing better than to fuck you in public with the lights on. In front of daycare centers, the dinosaur exhibit at the city museum; i would fuck you especially in church, in front of God and everyone. If i were a boy, she wanted me to know, letting my own implications strangle me with their one syllable hands. perhaps she could have loved me then for what i was. instead she loved me like a door, a vessel to take her to capitalized Pride, secret agent fingerings, Where the hell did i leave my und

god, the simple morningness of it. the first shaken breath tumbling from the waking canopies of your lungs. come to me, open. come to me, start. i need you now, in this one sunrise, to give me all the mornings we will never have. each rising i have made without you, i will forget them. please, breathe the morning into me and simulate the rest of our lives. the ones we will not live together. i may wake up to many faces through the years and the years, but not yours. please. when you feel the world coming in today, we can be old together. we can be newly wed, softly drawn, with our lives a mountain range before us. wake up with m

the cast of her eyes is a metaphor for power. power, a metaphor for sex. together, we are two raging unsubtleties: mouths spread, breath all flood and leap. she is radiation, is wanting, is eruption. she comes to me easy and fluid like a dream and drags across every edge of the world. say, slick.  say, give. roar. she says she has forgotten the definition of the sharp tyrannical word, stop. perhaps she knew it once and perhaps not. she says this while her mouth is left open to let the rush in and her hands, her hands. heated and voracious. desirous of everything, she sips from the sun with cupped palms, then paints me with th