My Open Notebook

I miss getting a little drunk

off a dirty martini

at the place on hyperion

that smelled like old rain

while I write

sunglasses on

Ellis’ wayfarers

I pretend it’s 1988

you pull something out of me—

too much—

down thru

my stomach lining &

out thru

below

down below

to go up

below

the sacrum

sacred pit

the oracle cloaked

in her vapors

rising

from her pool

below

poets are like oracles

the gnarled forearms of olives

reached once thru my 

open

window

while my mouth—

sacred pit—

wrapped around that

brined pit

smoothed rough

by my tongue

feline tongue made to

scrape

at organs

& your mouth fell in mine,

deep gaping

sacred pit.

your black backed mouth, N.

your tongue inside rough cheek, K.

your fire zodiac tooth, A.

your reflection, E.

going down

down

to come up to flames licking

feathers floating all around us

from the geese

the eagle killed

& the wings

of the sun’s lover

sermon on the hifi

in static

and grace

sacred pit

that seven

lucky seven tattooed

over

the rib

you love to watch me argue

because I am good at it

and you are not.

you sit back in a pilfered chair

with a glass of wine

malbec houellebecq

and watch me argue

points you’d never think of

to our friends.

you are concerned with being liked,

“but my friends

were all so new & so very

beautiful”

there, with bowls

of chips &

sweet things,

phones multiplying

our presences, like

as if to say we were

ALL really there

(like more than normal there).

of course someone else

took over the aux

&, muses at the feast,

ambrosia on our lips (by which I mean

wine &

gin & sweet liqueurs & maybe later,

the potential for lipstick or cum),

we said yes to so many things,

nodded heads & swayed.

they were beautiful, like

a new city, somewhere you’ll

never live, but

talk about living,

is beautiful, 

like real sexy & real

fun. & to feel like you had enough

was laughable because

It has long been vacant, this 

position

at the top and bottom of all things.

The secretary supposed there

ought to be

a way to reduce the drama of all that, but

there it was,

such as it was.

When god lost his power

some time ago, there has been

a vacancy to fill.

Don’t you want it?

I’d rather play in the mud, 

I think. Hot &

sweet mud

leaking between the soles &

somehow under sheets,

damping the duvet — 

a crashing wave.

Submission: accepted | rejected

One millennium experience

there is so much to read —

so much to write —

there is time for this, even if not 

tonight

my days will stretch on

When concrete is softer than skin

and space is filled

with falling,

tender are these

Septembers.

This work,

this sculpture,

this art,

allowing itself

indulgence

under steel skies,

astounds the desert

with its crop of dwellers.

And if you listen close,

like that,

ear cupped,

you can hear the paint

of a hundred hues,

peeling from walls

Unknowing if September is even yet Autumn

and listening to love that will

levitate

a person to another dimension,

One,

Me,

or she,

rests

in meditation of flame

and everything it contains.

To the boy drinking from a forty,

understanding phrases that only one born in the nineties

could parse,

I find everyone I know

writing lines about

God

or holy men,

drowning,

mountains,

winter snows.

I think my holiness might be on an airplane.

And I realize,

they’re all the same:

the climbing and falling and freezing and soaring.

People are not trees.

We try to plant our roots

in each

other

or in

ourselves.

We had a big basket of them:

ripe

round and so

dark

as to almost be purple

or black.

A pool–dried–

like a birthmark stained your brown knees.

Lord, did you know how to lounge!

Knees at angles loving to earth

and sky.

I’ve never seen any person

so careless

with the folds

and creases

of her paper crane body.

Sunbeams that smelled like

chocolate

floated

over my knuckles

as the pads of my fingers

became acquainted with 

each vertebra.

These calcium protrusions want to

know each other

like we do,

talking about aspen trees

whose slithering roots

communicate between thousands of smoky-barked trunks,

intent on drinking

No matter what I do I can’t get to sleep 

tonight.

Glass palaces

like great greenhouses filled with long-leafed specimens

of such a deep jeweled green

I’m convinced they’re not real.

Your eyes, I think – for a moment –

are emeralds or beryl,

before I remember they are called brown.

If honey and almonds bathed in pure sunlight and saltwater

are called brown.

I keep seeing 

the curve of your lips.

You see me approach and you give me

the benefit of recognition.

Italicized, you’d call it:

this form of being.

I can’t stop thinking of your neckline

and the name that no one calls you but which I have fallen in love with

already.

You asked me to dinner

and shared one of your Spotify playlists with me.

In my head I’ve taken you to the ocean

with a Mexican blanket and an old-fashioned picnic basket:

one of the wicker ones with a hinged lid.

I thought this writing would help me sleep

like a tonic

but without your body next to mine,

my mind wanders these orange-hued heavy nights

in search of a replacement,

traversing to foreign cities with their glimmering lights.

Only, like me trying to navigate my way home, alone,

to high peaks across the desert,

There’s something about skin – the pieces that don’t usually touch –

brushing against mine

that puts a longing

(and a melancholy, for what type of person am I besides

a vessel?)

in my mind’s deepest crevice.

I wish I had a bicycle.

I’d ride her to the farmer’s market

on Friday afternoons

and to the museum 

where we could get in free to see the dancers in pastel tulle.

I’d oil her and polish her

in the sun

so that a gleaming with no rival

would rise out of her bars.

You’re one for metaphors.

You wear a key around your neck, for heaven’s sake,

its heavy dark metal resting

– no, clinging –

to your chest, which

(like some honey and spices

I imagine into existence 

on a pale lavender day in an exotic market)

radiates warmth.

Wet autumn leaves

pasted over spinning spokes flinging water drops

and an old piano of walnut,

one key’s varnish lost,

with minuscule spots of ink on fingertips

making topography.

People are meant to touch each other:

inner arm to back,

thigh to thigh,

thumb to ear,

lips to neck.

Goat cheese and true spicy chai

in a park.

The smells of grass.

A pair of ravens observe us from a maple.

Our bicycles lie atop each other

It is two o’clock in the morning and the kitchen sink

drips.

You lean over the cracked porcelain–

body bathed in moonlight blues–

like a ghost

not meant to wander beyond these walls.

What did you call out

into the tangle-sheets velvet night?

How your toes didn’t know

which steps to take

in this place that feels like a stop

along

the way.

Run the tap.

When will you grow roots?

Shut off.

Dripping.

At thirteen you were so 

sure of yourself.

You had a girlfriend and you danced

in pink lights that made you feel like a retro photograph:

stilled.

At seventeen, time moved

so fast.

You became afraid of the dark 

and a pain in the front of your skull was constant.

At twenty and thirty and forty

you are here.

Here between past and present that old memories could love.

Awake at two o’clock in the morning.