outside voices

Part of you hopes the world will stay this way:

(ending) —

because you’ve already trained for the apocalypse all your life

under a different trademark —

serial softdrink and tv rolling, rolling, rolling

so you can hardly hear the house moaning

under it all — disharmonious partially the wind.

Nobody wanted to get up on a standard spiral morning

to a bleak black ink world

watch life pass from a flat prison between the marginalized and the profit margin

spreading antiseptic margarine on two-dimensional

(characters)

bread

(blood).

No one ever asked to work for a living, when everyone

was living, because living

is easy when you’re working

on your life and not squeezing it into the juicer

of someone else’s

life so someone else

can drink blink-black ink lemonade

not hear the shriek-sigh-scritchdown as millions of voices flush down

the throat with no face attached.

This is business, the inside voices say,

and the outside voices are relegated in rainy doghouse

because who wants to hear them anyway?

The compass had a different thought for us

Bald as a hot-air balloon traipsing across the patchwork states, separated from the green farmlandish squares by several kilometers of dusty but otherwise empty air.

no one wants to hear a speech just do the concert dammit

Hi guys, thanks for coming out.

I’m not going to tell you about my depression and anxiety, because I think we’ve had enough of that (what with literally every other student sharing the same unique story of their special darkness and making us worry about mass shootings and farmgirl suicides in between the songs of supposedly hope and cheer.) I’m not going to tell you about my time in the military, because I didn’t have any time in the military. I hope I will never be able to say anything different and not be lying. But I lie a lot, you know. All of life is a performance — this is a performance, a performance at college which is a performance of intellectual academiademicness and stuff — but now I’m going all English major on you. So I’ll stop now that I’m behind.

Actually we’re not quite done yet. As I’m sure you already know from the multitude of promotional materials and the speeches that preceded this one, the theme of our choir concert today is the power of music. Whoop-de-doo. I was supposed to write a cute little spiel about how music has affected my personal life. But honestly, I’m not interested in telling you guys about my personal life, and I have a feeling you’re not interested in hearing about my personal life either. So we’re square. Also, I just kind of don’t really think music is all that special. It’s just a thing, like other things; it feels special if you happen to be doing the things with people who make you feel special; it gets corrupted over time if you leave it on the table to ferment through endless chatter. So let’s stop wasting time and do the convenient segue. Let’s end this cacophony of pretending not to be pretending and slip once again into the honest pretending that admits it is pretending — let the music begin! (when our marvelous conductor Grace Wellman raises the baton that is.)

friday like eleven

there’s a perfect crocodile in my class

who has always energy, so much energy

she complains. she is very happy to be gay

and a sunflower twinge in her buzzcut. i wish

she could skim some of the excess like whipped cream

off a hot chocolate mug and give it to me

to wear as a bloodsugarrush white beard,

to stay alive through all of the things my body is expected yet

my mind rejects.

i’ve been looking at lists all day and

now it’s time to write something profound-

-ly soporific, so i can fall

asleep

sparkly pirates

so what, so fine, so i fucked up, or you fucked it up, who cares

anymore

even

the energy abilified to me by providence

has run to dust in the shade of the river

gold speckles in the air making bearded men cough

gold speckles freckling children grey again.

that merry-go-round’s not so merry now there’s no one

to marry the plastic horses, crotch to saddle,

to unsaddle the selkie that only ever wanted to be free —

free to do what. when the world is nothing to do

i have nothing left to do with it

search for meaning in google or ecosia

you come up with the same gold mine

that isn’t yours. and gold

after all

is only

dust

a student on a spring

i have this obnoxious new habit of jackhammering my right leg up and down at about the amplitude of a stoned butterfly’s wings while sitting at my desk. The spherish bone on the outside of the ankle taps against the wood leg of the chair or the clunky wood torso of the desk over and over and over again until the rhythmic sensation of bone against unyielding through skin becomes a mantra and i want to get up from my desk and rest my eyes and my spherish ankle bone but i can’t.

mourning the something that wanted to kill me in light of the something that wants me dead

my head is a lighthouse

with no light — and something that used

to live ensconced

in the brainless tower has gone

the something that wanted to kill me is gone,

i think, replaced with a something

that merely wants me dead.

the two are as different as listening and hearing,

as falling on deaf ears and falling in a forest with one hand clapping.

where will i go? there is a clown in the mirror

gnashing its fangs into my heart, spittle and frosting and blood-blush rolling down

the glass; there is a balloon

lost over the ocean, not over the last hand to hold her

stringy neck, to wonder at the seaglass-green globe

of her secret world, a teardrop, a raindrop

uncomposed. & if the Princess ever comes

in, swelling from the horizon to harbor

you can tell her

i forgot the ropes

to moor her (safe & stiff) to shore.

Image: “Retired.” By Stephen Edmonds, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56025983

bloodletting

winter has come into my body

like an unwanted lover,

stillborn.

the dendrites in my skull have lost all their leaves;

it was a drawn-and-quartered process:

browning, ripping, crinkling, pinched by wind’s stiff fingers,

finally letting go, drowning

down.

the birds in my hands

curl warm in my gloves,

suffocating in their sleep for lack of music to breathe

and books to sing

addicted to spring, which they never needed before he opened

that first flower in that last, cursed april.

all anyone ever really wanted

was sex,

and now the cars river slower and slower past the pharmacy

until there are none at all.

like my body:

none at all.

 

Dans la corbeille

I need help/ necessito ayuda/ j’ai besoin d’aide

“Jay the swan is dead”

–

“How was your weekend?”

pointlessness

so glad it’s over

politeness

finished

nothing

“It was okay. How was yours?”

–

This is not a poem.

–

I have taken out the trash, wadded the wings of a fly into unspeakable

gray in drops of shower water

and I have watched the flies creep out of the mouth of a petrified squirrel

and sclamper over the bead-wide eyes

and I have taken out the recycling.

–

Football game or ultimatum? Who is to define?

–

Some people are so monday.

–

For my bouts of out-loud insanity,

you can blame the chemicals but don’t discount my agency —

it’s already practically free.

Possible titles for the sonata I will write when I am myself again

Love in the Time of Photoshop

B.rainstorm

T.rust

Cloudbreak over Bakersfield

Hammerhead Windows

Declaw the School System, Reclaw the Gods

Kitten Apocalypse

Apoco.lips.e.

I only love you because you are dying

The skeleton in the seashell soutien-gorge wants a vanilla mango milkshake

Waltz of the Dinosaurs

Cannibalistic Stars

Politically Incorrect Hermit Crabs

Music we used to like and now can’t stand

Still: a piece with no movements

I should’ve picked the viola

This composer has a terrible attitude

conditionnel passé

Dis.connect

Kitten Claws/Tap Dance/Kitchen Floor

Evergreen Links

Romeo’s Death was Faked

quasi una romanza

Contraptions for Arranging Bricks

Bricks for Cello Players

Cello Players for Alligators

Insubordination

: ) !

Forgotten Swashbuckling Klezmer Pirate Women

quasi una esistenza

Cherry Tarts

Origami Sailboats

Vicious Marshmallow

quasi una.

End Road Work

Some words are most beautiful to those who don’t understand them

Jewish Mermaids

Anachronistic Pineapple

A sea of weeds

Subjunctive Rhinos

thought experiment for ukulele and conundrum

Octopus Metropolis

Please knock, English broken

Crusade for Silence

Plankton Nets

The yellowing butterflies on the pediatrician’s wall

How to taxidermy a kraken

Brinkwalkers

Avoid Eye Contact

Christ was an Echinoderm

Sonata for an instrument as yet nonexistent

Holographic Zombie Ballerinas

[Written while procrastinating writing]

Microplastic Paradise

Forget Me Knots

Reconstellating

A lullaby for the war

The smoke detector’s lament

Avert your eyes

Sonata on a Sonnet by Blackbeard

S.carpool

Les choses comme ça

Map of my hometown in purple