hearts

he built their house of aluminum

and when it
crashed
to his numb feet he

wondered about trying.
she sealed the windows with disdain

and when people walked by with
corner-eyes she
smiled,

grating teeth.
their house was built to fall in time.

when the awning
in the faded sun looked
like their hearts

they moved on.

Human Microphone

I said we can't let our instincts scare us
Into stopping. I told the cops, bellow me a melody where
Everyone is armed. there are no Angels in America
And the earth is a dandelion waiting to be blown to pieces.

This is one nation united under Holden.
I said we can't let our instincts scare us
Use your body, we're taking out the steady center
The earth is a dandelion waiting to be pieces.

This on the ten thousand tiny screens
This one nation, united under holding
Our future too tightly. And one fine day--
You are your body. We're taking out the steady center.

Nearsighted

Things mapmakers (me, bats, the man
who maybe named America)
know:

Keeping edges,
Stitching middles,
The proper use of a plumb-line.

The Olympic sport of distance-shrieking
so all that’s eatable is known
and yours.

The art of claiming.
The delicate study of ignoring things
other people discover.

Not-asking-questions-ology.
Not giving apologies.
Squinting into the sun

As if you know its secrets, as if
it were only a tiny replica of the sun
on the map you made.

Adult Mart in Elyria, OH

Because I am a real 18 now I
go with stalwarts to the Adult Mart where
adults are bought or sold. Windows shining,
double-sided dildos arced in prayer,

and the neat rows of vibrating cockrings
in the pews, out in the garden. Here are
shapely butt plugs, blushing fleshlights that sing
in euphoric naked woman voice, or

when batteries die, naked euphoric
sea monster wailing to be found. Strap-on
Turbo-Dong doubles as a walking stick,
handy thing. We’re driving back when the fawn

comes out of nowhere,
eyes on fire, burned headlight lust.

G Reads Her Poems

G Reads Her Poems

when mt saint helens threatened to explode
they sent in planes with photographers
for history, and when the whole top slid out
the dust chased the pilots out of the blast
with a sound like human history compressed

this is on my mind when G does slam
& right before, when she dances with the aisle
and the floor and the ceiling and the walls
and then hits the stage and wipes her
hands on her fishnets and belts
diamond toads, frogs of peridot
expels words like they were authority figures--

a poem that starts with “you”
a poem that starts
“listen” a poem that starts “what they don’t get”
and pauses to smell the washed audience
sweating carelessness, fear to hear her --

when mt saint helens erupted ash fell in eleven states,
blanketed cars and trees and
bruce springsteen’s hungry heart (first guitar, lost virginity)
and G, negative thirteen years old, took notes
on how to rebel, yell the blues

things left behind

sometimes home friends ask
how i am
i don’t know how to pair “everything
is great” with “but the checklists in
sad people pamphlets in
student health—
it’s all there”
those pamphlets are always
wrong anyway that’s why
they’re pamphlets
there to be thrown out
transient.
yesterday i
traced the leaves falling out of the sun
this is my first
how the fall comes. i’m all for
the sun when it makes me born again
i could be Icarus
i too do not listen
to my father,
especially about the face i won’t
give you back: it’s among
other things i left behind
dresses hanging/gold foil stars/leaves
that stayed where i left

yosemite

When we came down the Mist trail we
were bears in the bear-warning-video
hungry hairy (strong Samsons)
tufted in dirt
willing to devour cars—

When we came through
the sea of people parted
like sheared sheep and we
waved the scissors above our heads
singing something about rivers

When we were juggernauts with
mosquito hickeys and
the mist pillowy and new lifting
all our shit off our backs
great and empty beer cans rattling
in our packs stories smoke dances
we were skinny dipping
with John Muir & his beard
—what a creature
what a creation

little wife

for both poes

before the ink was flat black she
eased the paper from my fingers

the smallest hands
hiding the absinthe

thirteen and coaxing ravens
to her window with strands of raven hair

such whiteness her face
whirling

have you ever looked an angel
in the mouth?

maybe she died the day we met
everything glistening

kissing cousins
sister bliss

thirteen won’t leave your side
of the family.

i wrote of young girls
their already-dead-ness--

her hands back
half bloodied from the coughs

memorial for a girl i never met

The sun is getting flighty, and
I'm still eating ice, and shivering, and
eating more.

Pink eyes
for everyone in that chapel.
Crumpled tissues on the floor, glass stained blue,
I cried for her tree new in the ground
the leaves still shaped like hearts.

B changed his nice shoes for boots
and as I waited he told me they were
Wedding and funeral shoes.
"I've only worn them five times. Now six

I think that was both.”

Who did she marry?
Her depression?
Or is it the survivors marrying grief,
marrying a crater?
The chapel marrying
its blue windows to the sky--

Marry me, suicide
and I will hold you until your ribs break
and your strings of sadness don't
I will hold you through skinny lightning
will hold your Norse vigil
will hold your only real question in my hand
and forgetting it's there,
worry it to shreds.

adenode

o small lumps of flesh
where even were you in my face
that i forget you're gone?

now here you are with accordions, singing
jangling wheezing heaving that old song:
"you're gonna miss me
when im gone"

don't think i didn't notice
the graceful way you bid goodbye
to the other soft shapes back there
i was there, knocked up
with anesthesia, down
by a scrubbed nurse in booties--

gone are the days of big fish mouth breathing,
middle school voice muffled
the ends of words indistinct
(people debating whether to ask me to
repeat something) gone

goodbye adenoids
thanks for the codeine
now it's gone

Dona Nobis Pacem

I'm older now but I used to be a young boy and when I turned five my mother told me something that nothing I've been through yet has erased. She said Baby, honey, we love you and we're proud but you're big enough and strong enough and it's time that you moved out. So I packed up all my things, my teacup and my fairy wings and I took the next bus out of town. And some guy tried to beat me up for looking at his peg leg funny and yes he knocked out a couple teeth but they grew back in they always do.

Once I got to town I bought a full beard off a man's chin with the money I'd earned from the lumberyard back home. And that made me look a little older and people didn't give me such a hard time, especially when I squinted as I did. And before you ask yes I met a few birds but they were a little young for me and I told them so because they couldn't read yet and I wanted to be clear.

I stayed in a laundromat for awhile and slept in the dryers mostly because the washers made me awfully damp. By that time all my clothes had worn to shreds so I made new ones out of single socks but once the manager found out she made me leave. I had a lot of friends though, and we had some good times since Toby was six and knew how to drive. All the rivers in town are paved and Toby drove this golf cart he borrowed down the sides and across and up through eight feet of water and that was how we bathed, once a year or so.

And I go so many freckles my skin couldn't hold them in and I had to grow a little bit and it pushed some hair out of my head and funnily enough it's never gone back in.
I met a lot of people and a couple monsters and sometimes it was hard to tell the difference, especially when I started carrying around knives and then everyone looked like a monster and I looked like a bearded dwarf with knives.

And sometimes when I wasn't growing freckles or hair I grew terribly lonely and didn't want my body any more, none of it, I wanted to be the water scooped up in someone's hands that could drain away if they weren't looking. And what I realized, like a salmon, was that it was time I visit home because my seventh birthday was coming up mighty soon.
It took me awhile to get there because I had to carry my whole collection of knives but when I got there I crawled on my belly underneath the kitchen window. And I poked my head up and there was Mama in the kitchen baking a cake and singing and this is what she was singing:
Dona
nobis
Pacem, pacem

and she was crying into the batter so hard I could taste the salt through the window. And then she saw me and pulled her shotgun out because of the freckles and the hair and also I had all new teeth.

But then she saw me for me and opened the window and pulled me into her arms and shook me back and forth and said Baby, honey, you're bigger now and stronger now but I sure missed you, kid.

[to hooligan]

Don't hate your hands, hooligan--

small sousaphones
large moths
gyroscopes

Don't hate your profession, wrecking ball--

getaway driver
guerilla anarchist
Tallahassee's accountant

of the year. Don't hate the world
(when it asks you politely
like a child)

why do your hands spin so fast?

Nana Eating Roses in the Hospital

"i have to go home to Mother.
i have the bread she wanted. it's stale as a grandfather clock
but what do we care?"

she’s not with us. shaking
like suicidal petals in strong wind
she fetches the bread; gets
on the train to Yosemite; meets
my grandfather; gives
him ultimatums about living in the West,
converting.

and I have blinked twice,
she is off again
substitute-teaching supported by
unlit cigarettes and Sicilian squinting—

making star pasta for grandchildren
tugging at her lemon apron--

what are these words shaping in her mouth
but not emerging?

i lean over the disposable bed
to give her our name to inhale
she bites
because time is fragile and she is not.

a moment ago she wrapped herself in her mother's skirt
turned when boys called "hey giraffe!" on the schoolyard
(the long walk home)

in this white room with sterile tile
and MRSA swept in the corner
and bed rails, and kidney pans
she eats roses
blooming with time.

Childhood

we were carving away.

quick jabs into Ivory soap
small hands on plastic knives--
we whittled till the bubbles, set free,
surrounded us. the
white slivers smelled like morning.

left with a fragile boat
or wolf
or house
we kept carving, into other things
smaller and smaller each time
like personalities tried on before moving.

stoves burn,
beds break,
plants poison.
pillows suffocate, and
children fall
slivers to the cold tile
and earn scars learning the intimate
dimensions of pain;
of layers carved away.

each accommodated and filed properly
another fear or hate.

my sister next to me on the cold bathroom floor
finished and looked down at me
--our haphazard carvings like a hair salon--
and we pressed the pieces into the shape of our hands
because something there was missing.

and maybe we knew then—

growing up is not a growing but a carving away.

Returning

This river runs over concrete.
the land never knows where its water is till
the forgiving sea claims its daughter.
until then,
like a creature trapped under ice,
the land feels for it,
a pressure,
a weight of birds and trash
won at dawn or dusk
when sun like a magic trick turns
dark water to mirror, slick and broken
with floating objects.

This river is a city river, breathing death in
regretfully--
still, when it floods the egrets come.
tall, princely things with
awkward legs they keep a secret
until moving, when they extricate each toe by toe
slowly disdaining everything.
and at sunsets the sandpipers come
shadow puppets filling the emptiness
of the concrete slopes, horribly
whole and permanent.
and always the small birds come
and go, taking sewage fibers home
in their beaks to craft a homely nest, and
the fetid algae sinks quietly into itself, and becomes
limp hands.

In My Hands

In my hands napkins become wretched things
Clenched thoughtlessly into balls, worn into shreds
In my hands pens that click
Become disasters, while important papers become ragged;
Gnawed.
Wet glasses sing, and candle wax
always cools in the shape of my slightly burned fingers.
In my restless hands, whole things
Are made part.
In a prison cell I might scrape the iron bars with ever-sharper nails
And when I had made a feasible escape
Sit there dumbly. Worrying
The thin blanket between my hands.
A contiguous rosary.

These hands are lost
being hands.
They were meant to be hummingbirds or other
Winged things.
That could fight air when troubled
(instead of each other.)

And so I write, and the hummingbirds
Settle into silence.

Canada Trees Understand

Black-eyes birches on my mind when
Everyone else on this plane is sleeping
For forty rows they are passed out.
Embarrassing, drunken, wilted; their mouths
Dark chasms
Like my birch's slow doe eyes
The white skin around them peeling, molting.
The deep tissue color showing through
Matching the scab I got from wrestling a friend
In an inflatable obstacle course
Inflatable carnival bright colors sweating cotton candy--
Later, the boy from Connecticut told me he couldn't
Inflatable joust me because he was a pacifist
And I thought, I could be a pacifist
But I couldn't because
When my eyes gleam dark knots
And the white lines sing
Of being in boxes
I reach out a fist, not a branch.
And i punch and hit because my hand will hurt
And since it hurts both
It hurts none.
Something for nothing is magic.
I am itching, I am peeling,
I am broken but still growing.

Growing Pains

It's the manic way I hug pillows to my chest when I
Can't stop laughing.
The dense ache in my legs.
I can't sleep.
No one sleeps.
I close my eyes and let them ache

The Sandman

Left brain right brain bridge of your nose

Here comes the sandman
Left brain right brain you make me insane.

Here comes the sandman

Just past the bridge of your nose there are
Clouded faces swimming in your memories

Walking so softly

Into your spinal cavities pulsating womblike thinking
Not of nothing, floating tree rings static tv screen
Fractured shards of the house plant you dropped, cutting
Your hand on the pieces of the universes you glimpsed in the
Deadlands before sleep.
Sunspots and blurs, your groggy and throbbing thunder, the
Music of your eyes.

I am an egg I am a curled up shark waiting for life in
Its hard and twisted purse
I sense nothing. Only this.

only you when you blacked out and imagined
Birds in a sandstorm.

Creeping along in the tips of his toes

And he sprinkles his sand

With his own little hand

In the eyes of sleeping children

Go to sleep my little one

Go to sleep my dear

Promises

Somehow the edge of land seems more like the edge when you're 100
Feet up on a cliff
Somehow promises seem more breakable
The idea of them fragile and thin. Watching
Elephant seals move on land makes me think of
Teenagers, even their amphibian names
Even their noses as they rear up
Crash into each other and in the moment
Before the collision the way their necks twine is
Religious but they crash and fall into the ocean
And in the splash I can almost feel
The energy it takes to rear up again but they will
Not like a choice but like a chemical flight controller
The one adults never acknowledge when they ask awkward
Unanswerable questions like
But what were you thinking?

The Elephants leave the sea and the seals crawl onto land.
They rest. They molt.
When they rise from the deep they bring it with them in sound
Like the fresh on summer nights with the windows down
A deep and ripping rumble.
In the sea they swim alone but on land they need the solid weight
Of others to dream that they are underwater once again
Hunting for life.
They wake each other but it's only to check that the
social order is unchanged
Only to compare nose lengths
To stretch mouths red open slowing gloamy teeth and make that sound again.
Promises are impossible. This
Is the real edge and all others appear edgy but go on for secret ages.
I promise to be stupid forever.
I promise to never move till fall and only wake you up to yawn
Fearsomely.
I promise to never change the fact that I am changing all the time.

Poem 2

We drank this city down on foot.
Chasing bridges with colder drinks
Brown bread single-file marionetting
Past every window on Lombard St
And if the Palace of Fine Arts has survived the fires
The earthquakes
The tourists
Then maybe it would have fallen if we hadn't
Loped in throats open eyes up everywhere every filigreed surface
Our substitute for redwoods
These things lift us up.
We talk big here words that burst speech bubbles
Generalizations about this our generation
Madcap comedians, scientists, mourners we become in
Five days, each a line on the staff paper, the Richter register
Where the notes fall into patterns
Trace out routes we wear into sidewalks
(page turn)
Treble clef for sunny days. Minor keys for mist.
We'll hear this music in days months years
After it is sung felt eaten lived chewed because
We're light on our feet and
Not even sound catches up
And now we are fighting with river rocks now we
Read serious things and smile for the understanding
Smelling of gasoline, mesquite sweet and skunky.

Blurring

My back started curving one day when I
wasn't watching. (It was listening
when I told myself to hide.)
I craned my head forward, up, out,
teenage hunchback,
a question mark fallen on its side.
And now I don't know how to right myself--
except when he shows me, when
he moves my shoulders down and
my neck back and
my stomach up somehow
(it's in my throat)
and his hands flit over me,
fixing me in a hundred places,
all the places where I warped what I was given.
And it feels like sunshine, or slower waves.
I think about starting over. Is this starting over?
I blur lines, body and mind.
And I couldn't tell you which side of them I'm on,
or if sides even exist when
the sun is on my edges with his flitting hands,
throwing shadows out of my shape,
lifting their weight because he can.
As I watch, he irons the dark shapes to the ground
which holds all bodies
and all secrets.

Saying It

These are the warning signs-
If you find yourself with someone at a favorite place
In June, or August
The leaving months, good settings for goodbyes
Be on your guard for
Prolonged eye contact, sudden silence. Run
If they say "well" or "so.."
Sprint if they start the g-word.
Politeness is for people who are practiced with these things.

In Death's Library

There are only children's books.
And not the depressing ones where the mother dies,
or the pet dies,
or the grass dies.
The children's books that involve birthdays mostly and
sometimes Halloween but only if nobody gets scared and everybody wears a
hilarious costume.

Death's librarian chooses carefully.
If she missteps, Death may not go out to work
Death may stay in bed
(it has happened before)
and let the detrivores crawl to his door waving
their cockroach arms for mercy, for
Death to stop crying and start working
so they can feed their families.

In Death's library, eating is allowed
and running and shouting too because
if you need to, you need to.
Death's world is quiet enough without having
an entire room for silence.

Waiting for the Department of Motor Vehicles To Open

i slide down the bricks to the
cemented cobblestones letting the morning sun under my skin
an overgrown man grows towards me
and grinds his cigarette into the ashtray
besides me, two inches from my face
the hot and sour weedy smell so real compared to
its wispy smoke

i open the california driver's manual for the first time:

note where you are.
do not be in someone's blind spot, especially that of a large truck or
a streetcar

and yet the kid next to me
is drifting
is spitting on the ground, small explosive bouts of drooling.

he watches it pool in the pavement and
the bubbles form and rise and pop.

“My Best Friend Max Wincester Explains It All To Me in Third Grade At Recess”

Listen.
I'll tell you how it happened
but you can't interrupt, not even
if you think of something really good.
Kid America ran away from Mama England cause
she was being mean like mamas sometimes are.
So America wrote her a letter called the Declaration,
and declared that his new house was a continent and she couldn't
take away his pocket money anymore.
But wait. I'm getting mixed up. Before that was Columbus, who
cleared out the brush and also the Indians,
but then there was some fighting about the Civil War but then
Abraham Lincoln said together we stand,
divided we fall, which is why
no one walks anywhere alone nowadays.
World Wars One and Two, there were some others
that happened to other people, but
those won't be on the quiz.
But I forgot, sometime in the middle of that
Amelia Earhart sailed through the sky but
over the Pacific, which was twice as blue but not as deep,
maybe she got confused or something, anyways she crashed and
all they found was fingerbones.

I pledge allegiance to the flag,
One nation, under God,
Praise Jesus who hath written in our Constitution
of the separation of church and state,
but not this state so don't worry.
And that's history, you're
welcome.

An EP

Track 01

Adam and Eve, deaf and dear
in Eden's silent wonder
suspected there was more.
Eve bit first,
brave new girl.

Track 02

There is no sound in space.
Or-- they haven't found it yet.
Fetus-floating, tethered to the mothership,
the sailors sing anyway,
convinced that the sound means they're still there.
(Home, where my thoughts escape to, home, where my music's playing)

Track 03

Live on the Migration Route of the Pacific Gray Whale

AAAAAOOUUUUUUUUU
UUOOAAAAAAAAAAAUUUOOOOO
AAAUUUUAAAOOO

(Swim closer to me. We have a long way yet.)

Track 04

In the hale heart of the woods
tents on our backs like
unsteady turtles
we settled in by a tiny lake.
From across the water: a pan flute
hollow calling joy and peace
and loneliness.

oh yeah this exists.

(rejected commencement speeches are the bomb diggity)


On this, the day of our graduation, there's a lot of self-congratulatory talk. You know: "We did it!! Go us!" And we should be proud to consider certain aspects of the past four years. But I know that I, at least, have some less proud moments. Some apologies to Pali. These are (some of) my confessions:

• I have carried a Sharpie onto campus multiple times.
• My phone has gone off more than once in the same class period.
• I fell asleep in the library beanbags more than once, and I'm going to be honest here, I might have drooled a little bit.
• I don't think I participated in the wave in a single pep rally.
• I have pretended not to know what Jorge meant when I was wearing a hat and he gestured at my head.
• I have perhaps abused the free milk policy, but to be fair I only realized it existed this year.
• For four years, I have contributed to the traffic blockage on the second floor balcony above the quad.
• I have never in my memory covered a math textbook.
• I may have huffed some rubber cement in 9th grade, but I maintain that that was an accidental but inevitable side effect of taking Ms Curren's class.
• I have used the roof to make important phone calls that in retrospect were not as important as I thought they were.

I guess I'm telling you all this because I can. I can say all these little things right now because right now we're sort of invincible. Today we get to forget about confessions and mistakes, and pretend to remember only the good things. Today we could be anything, could do anything, (maybe even have a conversation about something besides each other.) For the moment, we can say goodbyes with nostalgia looking back, and hope looking forward. As we go, we carry with us the support of the parents, teachers, friends, and staff who put up with us. Thanks for making us laugh, making us think, and inspiring us to suck less. Thanks for letting us be dumb teenagers but also for expecting more of us. Thanks for letting us make our own decisions and our own mistakes.
And finally, because some self-congratulatory talk is in order: Congratulations, Class of 2011, because when we throw up our hats, we'll be as free as our hair.

my poetry project

so this is a poem i wrote last year but we had to turn a poem into a video for an english project so i rewrote bits and such OKAY HERE IT IS, don't laugh TOO hard at its craptasticness

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAoztikTqDs

also thanks to josh and jesse for the tech help :P

sorry please thank you

I'm sitting on the bus, writing, a sea of empty seats around me, when a man, probably around 40, motions to the seat with my bag on it and asks to sit down. I inwardly curse, because I'm too paranoid to write if there's someone next to me, but I move my bag and smile.
"Thank you," he says. He takes out a tin of mints and suddenly I know what is coming, because I have taken too many buses not to know how this goes.
"Would you like one?"
"Oh, no thank you."
"Do you go to UCLA?"
"No." I literally have to bite down the polite words that answer his real questions: Where do you go? How old are you?
"But you live here?"
"Yes." I stare out the window, then at the empty seats all around us. His hand is casually perched against the side of my leg.
And four or five stops later I get off, incredibly irritated and not entirely sure why.
On one level it's with him, for interrupting me. On another I feel ridiculous for being mad at someone for being friendly. But I'm also irritated at my politeness, an instinct I have that prevents me from being an asshole to strangers.
I'm not sure why, but I am incapable of being an asshole to people who actually deserve it.
Around my family, I am what they sometimes refer to as "snarky" and sometimes as "fresh," but put me around someone I don't know and I will apologize profusely if punched in the face. Am I just trying to be liked? Do I think all strangers are psychotic borderline-personality rapists who will kill me in a dark alley if I don't smile and say Thank you! with the exclamation point?
Neither option is particularly comforting.
But I guess it's a little comforting to know that my sister is the same way. Once, biking to the store, a truck knocked her over and when she got up, bleeding in five places, she said "Thank you."

We talk about it sometimes, wishing to be rude. Wishing we could say what we really feel while simultaneously knowing our nervous, careful paranoia will prevent any such thing.
"It's just the way we are," she says, and hugs me.

Carving

If I could carve, I'd carve the imprints of bones into a block of stone. Then I'd chisel out some teeth. Maybe wings, or scales. Claws. I'd carve a fossil of some beautiful, impossible creature that never existed. I'd call National Geographic, or the Royal Society, or Science magazine, and I'd say, "I think I might have a story here. You're going to want to check this out."
"We're on our way," they'd say as they hung up.
When the scientists arrived in starched lab coats and blue gloves, pushing up their glasses, I'd watch as they conducted test after test, and I'd call experts in mythological creatures. They'd declare it a phoenix, or a griffin, and the scientists would collectively sigh. I'd call disreputable newspapers, convince them there was no time to carbon-date if they wanted this story exclusive. The article would be printed the next day, with artists' rendering showing the beast in roaring glory, a dragon-chimera-unicorn chasing down pterodactyl prey.
And people would shake out their newspapers. Skeptics, of course, would protest; Charles Darwin's descendants would personally send me hate mail. My work would be referred to as the Piltdown Block, or worse, Fossilgate.
Still, my phone would ring ceaselessly with people who believed, conspiracy theorists, and interviewers. Most of the interviewers would have one question: motive. Money? Fame? Revenge? Religion? No, I would tell Oprah; no, to David Letterman; I had just been digging in my local quarry. Then, turning straight to the cameras, I'd say, "You never know what's out there, waiting to be discovered."
And very suddenly, I would wink.
Children would be found the next morning away from their Xboxes, digging up backyards, searching for crazy birds and winged lizards.
And if instead they found pill bugs and earthworms, how could they be disappointed?