food poisoning

Spent all day holding it in

Having meetings over the great corpse

There she was crying in front of me

I had told her this would happen

And when the sun reversed its face

The cool night air was sweeping through my guts

Like a pile of dead leaves and broken glass

And when they slept together in the floor below me

I could hear the howls made to hide the moon.

Two days after, the clouds spoke

And the winter fear of fur glistened on my lips

And the sun slid yellow into my pocket for the year to come.

But now I am rocking back and forth with my hands over my stomach wishing

There was something I could punch

Into a great many hearts the shadows expand

I see them when they pull out their phones and scroll.

And bukowski didn’t quite say it

With his mouth full of cigar smoke behind the curtain

And neither did Eileen with her almost prostitution.

Let me take a try—

We share the fact that we are wounded animals.

Everything can pour out,

I still open my mouth.

The night donald trump was elected

10 miles every day

there are rocks in the tongue, splashing

over and onto the underside of it.

but my past is not yet conceded

at the late hour of 3am which is

regulars with regular orders.

 The democrats also don’t care about my friends.

Love is a word reserved for the world.

Love is a feeling held in open palms and glistened onto

The seconds as they fall.

Love is not a luxury yet.

We gasp over glass and pretend our cloth

Gives us specificity or at least some solemn protections

But this is a moment we are reminded

There is only this that we create and whatever

Else is happening. Nothing more.

They could find a thousand prints over the gun I do not yet own

But who is who is who is looking

At this something not yet seen

And a small part is excited by the great barrier gulf sucking up

Every breath I take at this hour. The time that

Is given us. But all the rest is clipping down

The windows, is turning the top lock and seeing visions of

The kind of fire that is not alive at all.

He is elected.

Kb is high in bed, lying awake. After touching all night

We cannot speak. Can we?

Will we fight and win only to have it taken by a larger hand?

Who cares whose responsibility this is.

I am dreaming with her hand in my fur,

Rapping my heart as it sparks in snores.

I am meeting her mother and telling her I love her

In the hours of the morning neither of us have.

If you have given yourself over for

The movement of people growing in a way

That it is clear the fear has conquered,

Then what? He wonders

Split over the mimeograph he has taken a year

To not fix and a bottle of angel’s envy he does not own

Sitting on the table in front of him.

You cannot drink to forget

You cannot drink to remember

You cannot rest with it,

You cannot look them in the eyes, people you love so much
you want to take it away. stay downstairs.

And what has a running away become?

Many things but also, 

Love. It has shown love and a life you could live

and that Is why we cleave to it.

Do you see the complications in the ink?

Do you hear the tremor in Donald trump’s voice?

Who is he now? In these wee hours as she concedes?

And where are we? On the dark road

Slick with rain, afraid of windows

Reaching out with child’s hands at us,

Voices of our ancestors welcoming back

The closedness of a world determined,

Of ships being turned away,

And a world of lists lists 

oh lists that truly, we already had.

The hair of all our haircuts breaking down

The door, and now we do not have a choice

How it enters.

Always it was coming up like

Nausea, like the whales.

"It is too cold out to stay.

move your legs. We cannot sleep here."

The words finally break—

Hold each other, but do not hold on.

"We must get going.

We’ve got a long way to go from here, babe.”