Your Hands Like Moons, Like Tiger Teeth

Hear a slow stair of doorbell
in an ugly place that
maybe I like. And when there's
a lightning jump it's x-ray frogs again.
It makes me think my head, which talks
with your voice. I can say right now, I don't
want your Christmas cards with the children
that aren't mine. Have your hands say "yes,"
or, "no," but quick and straight.

And last week.

I can't say I've ever liked church
pageants, but I like the word pageant.
I went for my friend, to sit
on the green velvet under the
plastic pine and saw her sing.
Then her mother sucked
the last pill and I flung back
to the green velvet, the fake plastic. Never such
courage as I'd always have rage, simple rage.

A high-pitch only means daisies
to me, and a low something of cane
sugar. You couldn't hurt it, girl, it
ain't a thing. Because even the bad vibes
I toss beyond the windowglass
draft up, they blow right back,
balled-up paper bits in a six-story
upward hurtle, and it's eerie: the
jarring dust murmurs there,
crooned before underlit brick,
unsung bigtop, an alleycat bedroom.

I love to read

            papers that

redact
my holes.

they make me feel
            written, which is

            a good feeling, like

finding
a fellow

            metalhead
            on the bus.


I like to leave them out

            strewn on
            the bed

so you'll find them
and press them

so the bullet points give
            you time
            and space
                        to memorize

my birthmarks.


that way,
            when I hate you

                        you'll know

it's just
my eyes

            spinning
            like wet wheels.

Uppercut

Oh Billy
in a town where I lost every shirt on a fence
you
shaking your hands at the birds
fell down my basement steps.

How're you doing?
I walked outside to paint those steps on Tuesday
dogs were digging up the ground
in this town where we
called you Shakespeare
you wrote me some sonnets
and some plays about death
but it turns out
you were
a lady!

Well, now I'm checking my smoke alarms
(they work OK)
and I've got the burners lit for you
you ugly thing.

God Is The Lord Of Our God

We slopped at the bandstand, loving our squid savior. Thanks to him, we poured the cement harpsichords in every bar in America, and the squid's trilling leapt and receded. He got his medal and we went home.

Upset by the car alarms, they used to whine, whooshing up from the dark zone, a billion tons every night. In the morning, they shone in the moment of their birth, and for nine hours slept humming in their crystal beds.

I once met a man who wore a necklace of their beaks, chain garlanded through the nostrils, stained green. Scars gotten in their acquisition swam and hinged across him. I asked him how he'd stood their squeals, but then saw his eaten ears.

We saw them sunning one day, Peggy and I, them lifting their eyes like holy books to the sky, tentacles a fractal of slamming noise. I drank my Pepsi and mouthed, "Let's go." That night they found one on the street. I came downstairs and the backhoe was coming towards it. I still wonder why it tried to walk to us.

The oceans are silent now. Every two months we pour whiskey in it and dance to the harpsichord, fretful stilted dances out of fashion since before white people lived here, and they dream. In their dreams they are silent. In my dreams their purring wakes me.

Little Bent

Starring in a sick man's dream ain't easy,
but it's warm and the dark is chiseled noiselessly
in there. Three steps forward and I'm
drunk, shining still off
his cold chin, brains hot with fever and sleep.

Under his eyelids, I'm trying to think around
my world. I wonder at my grandfather
crouched in his foxhole, eating mud and wanting
his hands among the flouncing beat of mortars. What
did he cry for? When I drink wine I feel
his steel plate in my own guts, warming like
a rod, spun by sadness.

The odd pull of waking leaves us both
like a thirst for water after whiskey.
What would I do from it? The dust on boots
from a distant star, quaking gently in its fleece.
I'm sleeping for two now and the crime
used to be a spiral, but now is peculiar
and nothing to be proud of.

Exp

My eyes are always never open for sure
In your white casing far be-dressed
While I think of the squirming way
Our knees hump as I dream
Of my family dying and great white
Mile-wide rivers caulking
Fat snowy cliffs, with nothing
But grandmothers sinking all in it.

To be soft, hit a certain branch
I will hear it shuffle and twine
In the back-magic of my slightness
Shapes of fine pinecone sluice dripping from the handset
Everybody wants to be my mother but
You’re my mantle something standing
Sudden handle in a farm scene
Like in churning art ferocity

It’s coming out
It’s coming out my heart-place

Everybody wants to be my mother but

Our little grapes trill on the vine
Wherefrom shapes hold, recoil
This is bee-stung singing song
This is us smoking

Interior

over time our skeletons acquire
colors, our bones
become painted. then the lies

our bones tell slant, oblique
like rafters, like passports

resold

the bones form a basin which this is—

this is where
we keep
the before sleep visions

where

one awaits an elevator

if you want I’ll put
my cheek against the slope
of your loss

which

moves my fingers
in your sleep