you'll get used to mytwo-fisted sweetness...i'm sure. and i've been bass-ackwards long since before you
EVER came along.
and i will give sufficient warning when appropriate,
sound crass, brassy and stereophonic-typ i cal
when i say i am
high maintenance
moody and given to extremes...
i am confident that i will make your life a living hell,
weave dreams about your cranium,
fuck up more times than necessary to prove to you that
i am indeed
just slightly on the verge of be-leaving i'm one
psychotic pup, one sporadic chicken and
thoroughly melodramatic with
enough issues for a magazine rack:
genuflecting on how fuct up my parents
my father and my mother had only two children together
eighteen motherfuckin' years apart from one another;
my theory?--
and on one extraordinarily chilly night in February he crept drunken and slovenly into the sheets and she reluctantly gave his beer and corn-liquored body access to hers maybe by mistake maybe half-asleep maybe so bewildered that he wasn't wielding open hand a closed fist...or axe, that for one moment she allowed herself to forget about the rape at twelve, to forget her parents gone, her daughter distant, her sisters scattered about the country in random and neglected cities, and her own future forsaken for a life with a man that she could not love nor leave and for one moment she allowed herself to feel a burning in her snatch an itch that she herself could not scratch-- and i was the happy accident.
i don't mind internal bruising. heart murmurs, soft spots, birth marks, in-ies/out-
ies, or the other varying matriculating signs of being
into this world for the wrong circumstances. never-ready.
but i am getting older and sick of this shit.
one last year for teen angst and living "afterschool specials"...
and this is already getting trite.
i don't mind
excessively feminine. confessional. "new phase in his poetic development"
i will never know what makes an audience in front of me
hear rhythms patterned in my words the lilt and timber of a sibilant-s-plagued but
we are sources of boundless inspiration. us "poets."
we are supposed to write for ourselves, not the audience.
we tell our experiences in the hopes to shock souls and crack lies and articulate fear
and sharpen
speak truth. speak plain. touch tongue to teeth and teeth to breath and breath to force it
out again...the stories of a convoluted past, tweaked with madness and all
that
none of this makes any sense. we squeeze whole life-times into
six-second glances and twenty minute readings.
i will never be able to explain
i will never be able to explain
i will never be able to put into words
the way i feel when i wake up next to you in the morning wrapped up in
your white flesh against my tan and scarred first-light persona...
and i suppose i will never realize just what i did to you
to make you love me the way you seem to do.
maybe it was, as you say, the way i phrase things.
maybe it is the way i stand up in front of strangers in the dark and tell
the story of one life, or our lives, or our sex life...
we are all tangled masses of last-minute angst. umbilical chords of over-joy,
regret...bad metaphor and emotional asphyxiation.
walking, functioning fetuses with a bit of trauma on our backs
and a few pills each day just to keep us going...
but when i get up on that stage.
when i go down on you.
or when i visit my brain-tumored newly-sobered father in the home or spend
summers in the house that i grew up in with my mother
M O T H E R...
when i acknowledge how scared i am of loving you
and when i tell that to the world, to large numbers of anonymous strangers
in a candlelight and smoke-infused room
i fill these hollow whispers
as best as i know how...
with complaint