obstructed state

Let’s read the moon digest:

History of human feces held in an animal mouth

Decapitated by the day after day.

There are pains in the feet and gut akin

Only to their source, carbohydrates milled

Under the intense pressure of a single entity.

The wealth of suffering is tapped,

And only a belief in its sanctity

Keeps me from swallowing the key

That can shut the door.

Willful and strong she blows,

Riding atop with my dick in her hands.

She licks her fingers and bows.

The thing carrying our shit yawns

Like the ocean.

Have you ever looked out to only blue?

That is where I find myself these days.

If it is single bolt action you want,

Paint it over with blood. You can take a few days

Off without worrying if you can afford the revolution.

Spring grows inside the season we are in.

It is like the future blooming inside the quiet past.

Like the flower in the tree trunk,

Like the churning eddies of flesh gasping and grabbing each other

And finally coming together 10 feet off the road

By the maintenance station for the gas lines.

These days the sky goes grey early

And if the warmth touches our skin,

We find ourselves inside, at work, with too much to do.

These days the nights rise late,

A dull hum barely making it out of the smog of evening.

These days I am grabbing at my back, pulling the ink,

Stretching the maple where my heart grows,

But it is not my hand at all, but yours,

And I am suddenly aware you are looking at me,

I mean really looking.

The sides of my charger are burnt plastic

From where I fell asleep on the electicity.

My thermal sheets are old and tearing,

And they were not enough, anyway.

Any hope of distraction is two hours away

And tomorrow I must tell my therapist I spent another

Week drinking and not an hour meditating.

Here we go with eugene oneil on the Sabbath.

I am sitting with lube that terrifies me in my hands,

Staring at an empty jar of peanuts and a set of dirty whiskey glasses

In front of a dirty wine glass in front of a dirty beer glass in front of a picture

Of my grandparents at 25 that hides the dying jade.

After my shift ends, my shift begins.

I am not getting off alone.

I do not need it to be clean.

We haven’t a clue where we begin.

Let’s hang our shit out to dry—all the politics

And non-politic. All the great poetry of us, damp

In the wind, cold. Let’s stand inside looking at it,

Nude next to each other, strong in the limbs,

Breathing too heavy to be silent, hands touching.

Reading after

This town is walking amidst fraying

Telephone poles and new

Hondas, toeing its careful line, hiding

Its red face. There is a hand reaching

Deep, rooting around its cemeteries

And office parks. How does google feel

About that? About its disappearing ink?

Where is the anger over tiarimisu?

Every root is striving here for the deep.

I have been inside her all the way.

Neither of us has a way to forget that.

When I want more

And she wants more,

We are quiet with the world,

And then we cry. There is a crumbling

Happening and the world must change.

We are home, but it is no longer here

To be taken and pumped. Every year

A little less in the tank. I love her

And this world must change for that.

because it has been a week and i still haven't called him back

First, there were dreams of crystalline horses in hiking socks

Catching the last train in the blizzard

To a deeper part of the storm--

5^th avenue shut down and blinking red lights highlighting a solitary figure

dragging a shovel behind him in the middle of the white street--

“if I have a bad day I say I deserve a drink and if I have a good day I say I can afford to drink.”

today josh has $100 dollars in savings,

contemplating giving up on josh the sportscaster

newsanchor daily beard trimmings

a learned puckering of the mouth and warm

laughter following everything he does not have

a ready response to.

Like the wind rush of a car, birds overhead

get a late start for winter or spring on this day.

My body lights up in 50 degrees asking to have socks off

And feel something.

Dreams of grandeur and pink sky in

The writer’s row home

Make a stunning set to the silent film,

Each in his room, computer whispering,

And the studio filled with a depressed woman and her lover

Trying to paint what can make it better or

Just paint it at all.

Harry potter was forbidden Josh

But he ended up gay anyway.

And without saying it,

There were no comics in my home on the edge of middle class boston

And my mother, who I love

Fought to change everything,

Not knowing much about what it means

to be an Italian construction worker

with a mortgage in the suburbs.

As the train starts past 52^nd street,

Josh’s head droops towards his phone

And he swipes his thumb right

Once, and then again.

I come home to a menorah by the window

Arcing its waxed back at the setting sun.

Young people are always outweighed.

But the whole future, with months of travel

And sex and snow and homelessness,

And something else is determined

by more odds than that.

The politicians are singing America now,

And the farmers are coming to the empty nest,

And the firestarters at university are hoarding PBR’s

And the dock workers are laying down their arms

And liberty herself is shrugging

As a thousand boats leave and a thousand boats come in

And every day is looking in the mirror saying

“I don’t feel so old as I look,

but I’m proud of what has marked me so.”

My grandmother was married in a letter to Iceland,

And she died in a queen size bed in marblehead, quietly,

With her rugs still white and everyone expecting

The EMT’s, or whoever came, to recognize her and say,

“Barbara, it’s been so long. You were so much then,”

then look at all of us with tears in our eyes

“and look at all you've made.”

Her china set is breaking,

Plate by plate,

Party by party as I grow older.

I had a dream the one who stole my heart first

Sat cross legged over the pieces,

Arranging dinner for us

Before we would take a long journey.

I input Josh’s story to the database late in the evening,

And clasp the duct tape on each end of the screen shut,

Hoping these great fragments will grow

And bond and change each other

Along with something I give

That pushes us towards something new.

Today I woke up and saw the man who drove the trolley

And all the ones who ride the 6:36 trolley

And I thought I caught a glimpse of a former friend

And then I saw the grand hotel Monaco

With its chandeliers spraying light into the snow

and I saw hundreds of people

Storming in for brunch to celebrate this Sunday

And then I saw my life as if from one of the windows way up

In one of the buildings in the city of dreams.

It looked lonely and driven,

And I looked tired and hungry

And had rough hands the size of small towns.

And I don’t know what to do with that.

“man,

but it gets cold quick in Philadelphia.”

1?20?2017

We are breathing heavy over

The bar at 1pm, deep in it,

Changing neon across our faces,

Big bear bartender who refused to put it on tv

Turned with us now, falling on the sword,

Throwing out jabs like bottles from a group of protestors.

Part of this is quiet,

The way we would pass through security at 4am

Sleepy eyed guards ushering us through

With thoughts on their husbands in bed

Or bag lunches crowded into the back of podiums.

He speaks behind a golden eagle,

Wing tips pointed up for freedom carefully,

And interspersed with his wife’s strange garments marching to gold cutlery

Are images of young people in the streets,

Shaking their fists at a row of well trained facelessness.

I am in the stall-less bathroom

Gunmetal showing through the walls

And floor canted down to guide you in.

My ass cheeks are numb and my brows swallow,

As I pass by the mirror, my eyes are low.

My lover is with the miners,

With the nurses in the hills,

An audiobook away, and coming close

To the leatherbound violence soon.

I see a woman clutching herself on tv, hood turned up

And with hand over wrist obviously squeezing

As tightly as she can.

The handing over of power--

A strategically worn bible, casted across the country

Into plains and over mountains, through the hollow parts of cities

And the gullies of the suburbs,

Blotchy white, frozen over pupils,

Calling for blood, the same blood to be shed.

Do not stop, do not stop.

We are calling out to friends

And hundreding glasses left

With only foam along the edges.

If there is a thing to be said here

I think it must be

Held between fingers dry like a cigarette,

Wet like mud.

And definitely broken. I wrote before, “I am broken speech revived”

But these words, broken over themselves

Like backs over a folding chair,

Mustn’t comport themselves like a bourgeois patio garden

And mustn’t tell themselves they are doing the right thing in the fight

And mustn’t simply sit and get drunk over vinyl.

We are up at 6am, launching through rain spilled streets,

Wheels spitting it contemptuously onto our work pants.

She has two children,

But when she cannot control what floor she is on

She crushes her knuckles in the concrete

So that her finger dangles off her hand

Like a climber at the edge of the world.

And she is crying, slowly.

Then they take her to the hospital.

Some days, my lover’s eyes

Say only “see this,

See this with me.

We are the ones who will not look away

From the fire or the blood

Or any of the poetry bubbling bubbling bubbling.

If not, then who?”

Before the birds come out, I think if there are children

 in that crowd I think they are on fire like the trash,

Block bloc is adding fuel and blocking intersections

And they are hated and they are putting others in danger

And they are making me feel better.

White ladies holding signs are named diane

And they want their voices to be heard.

Rose flies to California Wednesday

To take her kids back from that abusive pastor.

I wish I had not gotten kicked out of her bar

Last night.

Or eaten that cake,

Or burned myself on the stovetop.

She was cool against the wood frame

When she whispered it was not our fault.

When I dreamed, it was very deep in the cavern.

First night of more than 2 hours this week,

And it was packing up for a long journey

Where I could not bring much,

But everything I did not take would be destroyed.

Fire is the one element man can create.

First I packed a bag of sentiment, of black porcelain Scotty dogs

Then I dumped it out on the floor,

Some breaking some not.

Then I packed food and knives.

And dumped.

Then I saw at the back of the room,

A tarp still wet with cold rain.

And I knew exactly what I needed

And exactly what I could not take.

Today flirts with apocalypse

The way the ladies at table 53

Look at me and then undertip.

Today is 2 bottles deep.

We are waking in the same dirty sheets

With the same sleeplessness

Wishing for the same pills we cannot afford to take.

Something about today costs too much to speak of.

You’ve gotten down on yourself

And there ain’t no way out

But through.

And before you can say anything

she is coming

down hard on you.

After, she rolls over herself,

And asks, sadly, where you are.

“Where are you?”

Where are you?

acid trip

life is in itself good. Look, a tangerine is perfect.

Soak it in ransom. Lift weights. Paint on yourself in black ink.

Listen to the river 7 times in a row. Always try to play a game of magic.

Giggle at the outside. Giggle at yourselves. Blast off. Try to play it off as if you—

Stop juggling stories. Work through tough new energy and guilt. Sliver of icicle like a path to openness. A thin layer of glass over everything so it isn’t sharp.

Then space in front of your heart like a turtle shell.

and counting

These grey rays of sun in winter

Sing still-born days to stoops of clutching

Hands and loose rolled bitters. They

Bring with them haunting futures and backs

Hunched against them as if against The Wall.

The future is not a wall. Perhaps it is more like a moon.

We collapse in warm bubbles,

Bathing each other slowly and with great care

As pores open again in safety, and we remind each other,

Like 1999, we are still here. We are still here,

We are whispering with every kiss and cheers

And gyration. We are still here. That is something.

I refuse to say the coming days will bring strange fruit.
it is too dark. And it is too light here.

We are, with eyes open against the cold,

Whipping down chestnut to approach the city like an invading force.

I want to whoop and cry with you, I want to shake my arm up high,

Sword glinting in the sun. We are brandishing courage

In an empty amphitheater. We are mumbling oaths beneath our breath.

We are cleaning our houses and preparing for meetings.

We are still here and we are continuing on.

Our lives are bulwarks against them. But

They must be more. My bed has several blankets,

And when I wake the first things I see are my grandmother’s trinkets

Arrayed across the desk. We are reading poetry together—

It is preparation. And something more.

We are trading massages, we are throwing each other birthday parties.

I am leaving the grey of the fences open. I am refusing

To cut the grass. I am making plans for weddings.

I am strong enough for this.  Fire, security,

Eyes watching. They will continue to take our bread.

They will continue to hunt us to the corners.
We are strong enough for this.

We are still here. the new moon is coming.

on the night of the orlando shooting

On the night of the Orlando shooting[1]

In my new room on the 3^rd floor, I found

A pint glass, mysteriously shattered.

I put my bare foot down, and

Swept the glass onto a scrap of paper

Because I could not find a dustpan.

---

[1] (50 people dead

they paid to get in

 in the dark  gyrating and dreaming

holding nothing in their minds

or some things:

getting laid,

what to have for dinner tomorrow,

their parents,

who made this beat,

how to get ready for work the next day,

how to keep the sweat from sticking to their shirt or

if they smelled good enough for him to be excited or

why the smiling white guys were always the ones to buy them drinks or

where their friends had gone)