People Are Not

Creatures with epileptic heads
Roll skulls at the waterhole.
They’re made of brown
And stitches of chitter chatter.

MTV music videos

Can be awfully tribal.

Some outer space

Buzzes, zips, zings
Out of speakers
And into bobble-head
Receivers.

They’re still rolling.

Galassi

Sits annoyed
In my lap.
We’ve never felt
So black-sheeped
Had we night cloaks,
Pitch wool pitching pitch,
And clicking tip-tapping
Hooves.

Blue Bud Light bulbs

Imitate starlight
On oceans,
But that’s all
Any of this is,
Imitation.

Reflection of images

Of what everyone
Wants to be,
But I am mirror shards
Refracting inharmonious
Face fragment,
Shedding pages
Of a dusty pink
Poem.

Poolside means

Bronze bimbo busts,
Shiny blue cans,
And “You can’t read!”

We failed ourselves

Today.

"Find what you love and let it kill you."

16 year old

Fell mushy gushy love drops
Over a sentence sucking synapses
Into bitch-in-heat orgasms.

Aphrodisiac syllables

Boiled over spaghetti sauce insides
Like sonic speed time lapse rose bloom.
That furnace fired hot
In heart valve,
Stomach lining,
And pelvic bone,
Really sent her shivering
Like walking tightropes of
Inverted equator.

Came enough times

To document jawlines
Wasting mouths
Wasting tongue
Because they don’t taste.

Enough to

Wash out roaches
With feelers brushed back

In some 90’s haircut.

Enough for storytellers

To etch her deep
In the walls of
California coffee shops.

Never had to make the call,

“The juicer’s jammed!”
Because there will always be pages,
Always self-servicing saucy stanzas,
Always dead poets reading
Under her showerhead.

Say she does jam,

Say molten masturbation
Molds into fly guts,
Then, it must mean
Success.

All dried up

Means she felt

It all.

Twofold Fruit Facet

I was made split organs,

Pulpy grapefruit blood halves.

Two pulsing chest vessels

Fluttering fantastical fidget

Dance out of time lasagna layers

Beats like da(da-dum)-dum.

Left pulp pit sleeps with

Swampy morning mouth melting

Downpour upon the nose bridge

In warm air rhythmic touches

And warms beside

Collarbone campfires.

Lefty can feel

Echoed games of fetch

On lake shores

No matter what distance;

Can lose a head

In guitar bodies

With hollow stomachs,

Easy.

Right lies down early

And gets up at

“Thought of you while

I got up and got off.”

Right kisses cricket chirps

Let out dry lip spurts,

Tastes tickles like syrup

Gone heavy smooth convulsions.

Get a little sticky.

Fruit cuts,

Left side digesting,

Right side tasting,

So that I’m

Sucking sultry spirit

Nutrients,

Absorbing all.

Romance of naked knockers,

Bristled body bushes,

And Henry reincarnated

Like words I’ve never heard

Timed out in my

Two heart valves,

Grope, gather, and got

One bloody river

To drown him.

Gather

and gotten.

Got

And gathered.

Buzz

All my flowers are out,
And I can hear him
Buzzing.

It’s the season of worker bees.

Buzz louder.

I was born a rose,
Rubbing rose noses
And sleepy rose eyes.

They tell me
Pythons cannot have man hands,
But men can surely have a python grip.

I paid them big money
(Fear can write a hefty check)
To wrangle and strangle,
My stem miserably mangled,
But does any of this really matter
When I can still be red?

Arms like vertebrae,
Far more delicate than any serpent,
Turn over my petals
Like the pages of the books
He couldn’t sell,
And there are stingers
In my skull.

So I’m blooming bird blood,
He’s buzzing bouquets,
And waves are lapping like breaking dishes,
Groping mercilessly for our feet
To drag us in.

They nearly took four legs
As we stood squinting against the dark,
Trying to see the whining dog heads
Floating between jaunty shoulders.

Had they taken paws,
I imagine we would have
Given our shoes.

Maybe stingers.

Maybe thorns.

Or lassoed
Some sacrificial snake
Before the jingling in my pockets,
Endless echoes of dead dog tags
Sounding an awful lot like loose change
(I already said I spent it all),
Pleaded “Plus one.”

Language

Language
Is most masturbatory.

The intimacy of words
And more words
Open my shirt
Like cracking a rib cage.

Fingertips
Count out syllables
On breasts scanning for satellites
Held up by an arching back,
Wanting to snap.

Had my own Phlox,
My own Art Bechstein,
My own service upon
His service upon
Sentence giving head
To more sentences.

Semen
On syllables
On pages
Being kissed,
Tonguing each word
In tight, tickled touches.

Language
Vibrates my vocal cords
Into his teeth.

Language
Buckles knees
Like folding chairs.

Language
Buzzes electrons.

Language
Jumps the windows
Up and down,
Stirs the moon
Like a bowl of milk.

Language
Lets it watch.

Tired

Tiresome paralysis lies
In the beds and the bones
Of those gone senile.

You can see it
In the woman
Closing her eyes
At the gas pump.

See it
In the man
Standing in the
Post office line
Without an impatient sigh
Or clicking his fingernails;
More floating than waiting,
Because the climax never happened.

'New' is a dead term
Of an even more dead language.

Probably from too many
Repetitive SNL skits.

Too many birthday parties attended,
Mismatching party hats
With bad looks.

Too many old lovers
With mouths full of
"Will you?'s,"
"I do's,"
"Must do's,"
"Children,"
And "See you tomorrow's,"
But never chewed.

Too many human stew fantasies,
But no gas stove large enough.

No one willing to lend a ladle.

I'm young,
But I'm tired too.

I lay down
In my porcelain kettle
With butterfly legs,
And I can't even
Get dirty
Anymore.

No imaginary macho's
Doing pull-ups on the
Shower rod,
Or fluttering black lashes.

All the "Rock me, Mama's,"
Dead.

Just stare up
Showerhead piss streams
And watch the window light
Trying hard to be a rainbow.

Can't tell if I'm seeing them,
Or white light prisms seeing me.

Wondering if this
Is what baptism is like
Until goose bumps start crawling,
Crawling me out of the tub.