Rabid Cats.

Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this? 

Before a face suddenly numinous, 

her eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate   

again, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss?   

It’s documented torrents are unloosed 

by such events as recently produced 

not the wish, but the need, to consume, in us,   

one pint of Maalox, one of Kaopectate. 

My eyes and groin are permanently swollen,   

I’m alternatingly brilliant and witless 

—and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.   

Although I’d cream my jeans touching your breast,   

sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest 

I am the windowed perch

Speaking with the grey somber mountain in the middle of the night

Covering my love in the frigid air

Spilling before the starred sky

Swollen clapboards

Cracked at the seams

Seeping out between the slits

But the cold air is bending my will to speak

In resting sleep I slink below the surface

Its hot

Hot like wet thighs

Stuck together

To chairs

Hot like I wanna cover myself in baby powder

Hot like my sweat smells before it leaves my body

Hot like the sweet smells of July and mosquitos

Hot like I cannot, stand, to wear bras

Hot like ice cream melting before it gets to your lips

Hot like sunglass make my eyes sweat

Hot like lookin’ at the dog bein’ so hot with all his fur makes me hot

Hot like I can’t fucking stand to be in the kitchen

Hot like the ground with its rotting winter coat is starting to smell like pee

Hot like I can’t touch you when we sleep

Hot like I want to swim through the air

Hot like I almost miss winter,

I am sitting on a boat on a trailer in Austin, Texas in the backyard of a friend’s house where my broken down truck is parked, inside which I live. The truck does not work, neither (I think) does the boat I’m sitting in and quite possibly neither does the truck attached to the boat’s trailer. I’ve very quickly descended into white-trashdom by way of a few months of bad luck. But I do quite like sitting in this boat, it makes me feel like I should be drinking a martini. Cheers, to me.

Despite the sea of overgrown grass, construction materials, derelict trucks and general trash which now makes up my sea and therefore my kingdom. Aside from my trash kingdom I’ve come to find that most people have recently become disappointed or at the very best confused by what I have become in this path that I have chosen. Logic, yes, I must agree there is little logic. But purpose! There was a purpose, is a purpose that has become more and more befuddled yet remains somewhat far below all the bad luck. It was freedom and art. A poet’s life for a poet and a rebel’s life for a rebel. A place where we have the space to breathe and the time to sit on land locked boats with martinis and long cigarettes, where we can spend all day playing music too loud in the garage of one friend to wish farewell to another.

I’m a writer, she said.

Always, I’m a writer.

Scribbling now and then, sour moods and unhappy mornings.

I’m a writer, she said.

But on other days, the soggy grass would stop her, a busy day would stop her.

I’m a writer she said.

As no one read her words, I’m trying to be a writer she said.

As she wrote less and less for herself and more and more for others.