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Nervous System
Make a list of everything thats ever been on fire Abandoned cars Trees The sea Your mother burned down to the skeleton so she could come back, born back from her bed, and walk around the house again, exhausted in slippers What else? Your brain Your eyes Your lungs * When you look down inside yourself what is there? You are a walking bag of surgical instruments shining from the inside out and thats just today Tomorrow it could be different When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight dying on a windowsill The voices of my friends in the sunlight All of us running around outside our deaths * Someone is here to see you again Someone has come a long way with their arms out in front of them like a child walking down a hallway at night Make room for them theyre very tired I wish I could look down past the burning chandelier inside me where the language begins to end and down
Scary Parents
I didnt shoot heroin in the eighth grade because I was afraid of needles and still am My friends couldnt
not do it Black tar a leather belt and sunlight Scary parents They filled holes all afternoon then we went to the movies * The shit-faced gods swam upstream inside them and threw wild parties and stayed up all night Under their tongues between their toes their stomachs All over their arms wings did not descend to wrap them up like babies As promised Still there is a lot to pray to on earth * Everyone is still alive if not here then someplace else Climbing out of their arms Resting their heads On what? No one is singing us to sleep Ian broke his mothers nose because she burned the pancakes She left hypodermics between the couch cushions for us to sit on
Some of the Men
I had to walk around for a long time before I could see anything The leaves circling down the street imitating the insides of seashells imitating my fingerprints I could sense my father sitting alone in his little white Le Car staring off at the empty parking lot No radio No wind No birds Just some guy in his car looking out at the blacktop and the shadows of telephone wires It isnt a sad scene, not really Some of us are getting exactly what we asked for Some of us dont even have to wait * Think of my grandfather, still drunk or asleep, passed out on top of my grandmother so she has to wait for him to come to along with the late Redwood City morning the light skipping in across the swimming pool The smell of failed sex bourbon and chlorine Dead cigars He taught me how to swim with one of his hands beneath my legs and another beneath my stomach how to cup my hands, how to turn my head Inhale and exhale and move gracefully through liquid * Look at Joshs father Stumbling into the bedroom at three in the morning the two of us asleep and all that moonlight and beat his sons head against the headboard
You fucker you fucker you asked for it
The moon His jaw splashed across the pillowcase * The Parietal Temporal Occipital The Atlas and Axis Spheroid and Spheroid The real smile real grin Your movable and immovable joints Your eyes your orbits Sutures If given the chance I would break them all * For a long time my grandfather tried to kill anyone who came near him Wives Daughters Stepdaughters What is it called when insects are stuck forever in a kind of amber? Then he got sick and he was going to die anyway and he stopped trying to kill people Then we could fall in love * My fathers advice is claustrophobic and flat as it fills the soft leather booth inside the restaurant Birthday lunch Red neon Cigarettes What you need to do is join the Army, the Marines something You need to be taught a lesson * Some of the men are standing in their backyards at night, looking up at the stars listening to the freeway Their hands in their pockets Everythings just as it was My hands in my pockets, curled into tiny fists My belt buckle gleaming
Kings
Our crowns look nothing like his crown needles and light and needles
of light fingers stamen Our crowns are made of dead hair and get swept out with the trash or ripped out by hand Our capes are bath towels wrapped around our necks and fastened with giant safety pins Not ermine, not rabbits I ran around the neighborhood playing King of the Block in my red underwear The trees didnt bow I was not on fire as he passed by * None of my friends are kings anymore They used to be good at being alive, pointing their index fingers at the trees, passing invisible sentences proclamations knighting the birds one by one All down my street the new fathers beat the kingness out of the kings when they came in for dinner and when they went to bed The birds knocking against the windows in the wind and he wasnt in the wind * When I think of him now all alone he looks like a mouse King of the mice Hes white like we all thought red eyes red tongue yellow teeth Scampering across the kitchen floor in the middle of the night when we wake up and want to make a sandwich Listen, when you turn back into nothing and disappear forever down a hole in the floor I want to go with you But we cant go What a motherfucker that is The kitchen window the only light for blocks Now were going to know what it feels like
My Autopsy
There is a way if we want into everything Ill eat the chicken carbonara and you eat the veal, the olives, the small and glowing loaves of bread Ill eat the waiter, the waitress floating through the candled dark in shiny black slacks like water at night The napkins, folded into paper boats, contain invisible Japanese poems You eat the forks all the knives, asleep and waiting on the white tables What do you love? I love the way our teeth stay long after were gone, hanging on despite worms or fire I love our stomachs turning over the earth * There is a way if we want to stay, to leave Both My lungs are made out of smoke ash sunlight air Particles of skin The invisible floating universe of kisses rising up in a sequined helix of dust and cinnamon Breathe in Breathe out I smoke unfiltered Shepheards Hotel cigarettes from a green box, with a dog on the cover, I smoke them here, and Ill smoke them there * There is a way if we want out of drowning Im having a Gimlet, a Caruso, a Fallen Angel A Manhattan, a Rattlesnake, a Rusty Nail, Stinger, Angel Face, Corpse Reviver What are you having? Im buying Im buying for the house Im standing the round Wake me from the dash of lemon juice the half measure of orange juice, apricot brandy and the two fingers of gin that make up paradise * There is a way if we want to untie ourselves The shining organs that bind us can help us through the new dark There are lots of stories about intestines People have been forced to hold them, alive and shocked awake The doctors removed Ms smaller one and replaced it, the new bright plastic curled around the older brother Birds drag them out of the dead and abandoned Some people climb them into heaven Others believe we live in one Gods intestine! A conveyor belt of stars and saints We tie and we loosen minor and forgettable miracles
