Tongues and Bluebirds

do you grind your teeth while you sleep?
just to keep your mouth closed,
so you don’t let out the words
that you don’t want me to hear.

tear your tongue out.
so I can have all the words you’ve ever spoken
and toss it to the dogs so they can learn to speak
your slobbering language.

your teeth are cracked from want
and now you cant smile like you did.

yesterday I saw a man pick up trash from a cart
using gas to pick up trash
I miss your weight most then
And I thought I watched a piece of ash
Flutter like a butterfly down to rest at my feet.

Ive got a bluebird in my heart
But hope is a thing with feathers
But mine is plucked
I feed it all sorts of wrong things
Mostly bits of other birds
And I cough smoke at it
To see if itll die
But it doesn’t
I don’t know why.

Snakes

It’s an addiction to pulling out my hair

and a cruel love for damaging you.

And if I catch you midway through a sentence to tell you

I’d like to go on a walk,

just imagine I’m falling out of a tree.

Ignore my hand and I’ll choose to be bitten.

See me the next morning and I’ll avoid your eyes.

I want to take up the pen and the rifle.

I want to blast off.

For both our sakes, go roll in the dirt

and then lay in the sun;

Turn your body gold

and then kiss the sunflower.

By the way, there’s a snake sliding up your spine.

Ethiopian Sunflower Kings

There are no more chariot racers,

and very few deaths in the ring.

The old man can no longer recognize the salt in the sea air.

Two small sisters walk up a windy beach in Mexico

carrying the body of a crane.

The thought of desposal is only considered between them.

Still, the old man can no longer recognize the salt in the sea air.

Today a stranger told me,

It’s lovely to see you smile.

And the sunflower kings

of Ethiopia

cannot bring more to the table

than their roasted seeds.

Sorry

Dear friend,

Could you say

that “sorry” is a freudian slip,

for our guilt about so much of this

and our failure to find a fix?

Because Sorry I can’t help you

 

because I see where you’re stuck

and I know we’re both doomed to muck.

And the disgrace is when sorry is said

over a spill on a table clothe

or a bump of the arm.

And we don’t ever mention

what we really mean

when we say

I am sorry.

A Leaf Imprint

There may be gold inside him

but mining it

causes pieces in me to crack and fracture and fragment,

corroding those persons breaking it apart.

 

So I can’t help but consider

the way a dead leaf can leave an imprint on cement

or the probability of a sunrise

in reverse.

 

and ask what is left behind

for pigeons and the brotherhood

of the last standing soldiers to

peck at ground

with the hope of finding something there.

Somethings Learnt From A Hound dog

I heard an old woman say
there is danger in tall grass

yes.

If you shatter a glass,

what you miss most are the smallest fragments.

Some men in Egypt cut off their own penis

When they are denied marriage to a woman in a lower class.

And wild boars flourished in the forest outside of chernobyl after the explosion.

And eating lobster was once regarded with the same disgust as eating rat.

And lyre is related to lyric.

Loosing a Bead

We stayed up all night

speaking of how big

and

small everything is.

And how we all balance for each other and our weight.

And that people have bad habits

made of which they can’t fight.

So we went on a quest for a

bead,

believing something good would happen;

So we just kept walking,

to find that the longer you walk

and for no matter how far you go,

you are bound to find something good.

Clacking Teeth All Night

I turn into a street dog when it gets dark

and all I’ve got is

some homeless owner

and this stray dog freedom

and I could sit on your doorstep

just for the hell of it

and never forget about the cantalopes

and how loudly your dog is barking

I try to learn the language of teeth

and only get past the tongue

and then sometimes I can’t sleep

because I can hear the clacking of teeth

on teeth in the night

and I think its right under my pillow.

Blood Clot

There is a single line of words and sentences

in the font of my typewriter

this is loose and nearly jumbled.

this is floating.

 

I have this instead of viens

and letters instead of blood vessels

and when I bleed, I turn pale from loosing that much of what was inside me

 

Drinking wine thins the blood

seperating so I can seperate that flow

and let it splash in those two colors

that mean creating a void so we can see the contrast on white

and that some part of me is opened.

Down the Hall From Where I Am Sitting

Down the hall from where I am sitting waiting for my class to begin is a woman yelling to the police to put her in jail at the top of her lungs.

“PUT ME IN FUCKING JAIL! PUT ME IN FUCKING JAIL! I’D RATHER BE IN FUCKING JAIL! JAKE IS FUCKING DEAD! PUT ME IN FUCKING JAIL!”

Her’s is a voice that I can recall more clearly than any sweet whisper or my mother’s voice. The crackle and strain in her yells and the shake in it just after the end make it seem she may be strung out. And it makes it just a little more sad and terrifying for her.

I can hear her struggling against the policemen’s grip and other jagged and uncomfortable movements.

Jake is no longer the concern, not for right now. He is nearly irrelevant. Because her voice has permeated everything at this point. It has been going on for about 3 minutes by now.

The linoleum underneath me is suddenly more solid.

Men’s strict voices try to calm her down, but there will be no success against her distress. I stare at the book I wanted to try reading, asking myself if I could even be comfortable with making myself read with her whole world being put through a red filter.