The Grand Lost Harvest

Lo and behold dreaming myself blue and dead inside the belly of my own whale. The intense sweat of a nightmare held up on yield signs, skeletal remains, jailers. That credibility has worn itself down into the timid pink of gums, bursting at the seams with its own carelessness. It was the empty pill bottle on the front stairs that caught my attention. I saw that the cap had been removed and it was empty, laying there the tone of an ugly crayon. Today will be too cheap to stand on. Today the lions hidden behind the chain-link fences in this neighborhood will finally swallow me whole and speak of it later to the newspapers.

FIRST POEM WRITTEN DIRECTLY TO MY MOTHER, RIGHT BEFORE MOTHER'S DAY

"Don't set out to become a cosmic
lesion upon your own damned life. Be more than you could have possibly expected."

Without you, I never would have known this.

The levitation that bestows a doubt, slot-stanced foolish there: Deliberate in heaving
on my sorry crib. A hereafter stitched into green windowcloth, my tongues intend to choose
offal in serenity. Brassia beating smoke all throughout a greenhouse. The nodosa extinguished
with absurd brevity. A garden you helped to form inside of me: the garden that cannot help but grow.
I heard Hendrix beat Dylan on "All Along The Watchtower" steamed off cat-piss with Brooksie in extraordinary poker light, leaving enough
to learn I was only 12. Stalled a climbed tree with my belly a wobble or stutter short. I catch of each branch. I am here for the interview. I am hoping to get the job.
My muscles bend quite the same as your own. I have celebrated your birthdays. I would loan you my scissors.


While there is a beg your pardon or a plea,
a take-me-out-of-this-before-I-begin-to-pop,
at least I didn't have to wear leg braces or teeth braces and you had no Autistic children.


Of the mother twice aware I can only shame myself in saying: I did not set out to become another cadaver on a cooling board.
I did not set out to become a cylinder spacing myself between.
Illegitimate in ways I have not been, I see myself facing inward.
There is a day for us. Gold will become of dirt.
The shores are staying apart from the sands. And so I salute your arms,
the pieces of you that can still hold onto a liver, lungs, spleen. Into life is enough to say thank you,
a short newspaper clipping of resolve. A gift ten times any other.
My unassuming "I love you" and an "Each day is your day."

Her Endless Urea

The boy dreams in the way most people shoot guns or ride in cars silently on their way to dentist's appointments, a lost gamble look in their eye. He dreams of suffocating a man made entirely of copper. He commits the murder using one of the pillows from his bedroom. He muffles the copper man's last cries outside of his own bedroom, places the pillow onto a silver altar two feet to the left of his mother's door, turns around and knocks at the center of the door four times. "I'm finished, Mom!" He is proud of himself, his cheeks are warm and a trace of sweat is developing above his eyebrows. "Come in," his mother calls from within. Inside the walls are copper, the bedsheets are copper, his mother turning into some sort of statue. She is coated in algae and her tongue wags on the outskirts of her lips. "I'm so thirsty," she whines. She has evacuated her bladder, a wide snake running from her belly-button down into the mattress. He pictures a bedpan two feet below her, a single lily planted in its center, dead or dying from her endless urea. It is warm outside - the laundry will get damp on the line with this sort of humidity. "Jesus," he thinks, "my underwear will be wet." She stares at him. The entire scene is grotesque. He is terrified. He grows up to be a mediocre scientist with one son of his own. His son grows up to be a janitor. Our dreamer eventually hangs himself after his wife leaves him. For now, however, he's just a little boy, dreaming violently.

THAT I BUILT A CATAPULT

My bicycle had been stolen & I still hadn't told
my father (the one who gave it to me).
My glasses were partially devoured by my dog (Cricket), and,
oh - I guess this was nearly a year ago.

This was the brown carpet time.

Fogged windows in July. Plant food and soil.

Grandma raised carrion in this house after Papa fell
dead under the pear tree, midway through a delicate piss.
I would have loved to be there, to let him die
away with me nearby. I was out trying to locate my bicycle.
After his death even Grandma's oldest friends said she wasn't the same.
Her eyeballs fit differently into her head and her hands changed
in tone and complexity, sprouting four new fingers.

Flesh in bleach, Bible slow-boiled.
Paper made of bread, water, and salt.

I'm confusing myself. Back to my grandmother's house.

We lived in the ceiling:
We stayed asleep indefinitely, laughing
desperate villages into tinder, to catch and to burn.
To make kindling of a century.
This way we couldn't be caught unaware of those who
fell dead and dumb where we lay naked.
This way we wouldn't be the sissies without
revolvers or breaths left to take.
This way we were more awkward than those
before us, sang lighter, stood less often.

Shaved our pencils into novels.

Slaved over hot tempers.

We sucked out murder and marrow,
sharpened our teeth as if in a fever.

Grandmother never noticed,
busy hiding my bicycle on a different
planet each day.

THE CATS AT THE END OF THE CORRIDOR

The automobile idles under her organs. It is parked in a gravel lot halfway back from the beach. This car is white. It was purchased for her by her younger brother, whose name we’re not permitted to hear. Our odds of ever getting to know him aren’t looking good. This white automobile was empty when it was purchased. She was not in it. Her brother, who might as well have no name, bought it for her seventy-fifth birthday.

He also pays adolescent men to choke him as he masturbates, though she is entirely unaware of this, much as we’re entirely unaware of his name. We only know that he is younger than seventy-five, he is her brother, he buys automobiles as birthday surprises, and he has larger problems than an unsubstantiated first name.

The seventy-five year old woman hasn’t bothered to bathe for two months, one week, four days. Anyone within sight of her comprehends this. Perhaps they won’t realize that it’s been two months, one week, four days on the dot since she’s bathed, but their approximations as to the tenure of her unseemliness will be strikingly accurate.

When she drinks too much cognac, she retrieves her collection of photographs, as to lick each one up and then down, on her own private quest for sweat. Her favorite one to tongue is the shot of a youthful Rudolph Valentino, one arm held over his head as if he’s trying to get someone’s attention, as if he’s calling for help. She imagines her mouth pregnant with him, his semen rolling off her double-chin.

In this way she keeps hold of herself, chases away the places where all good things lay down and heave themselves dry.

* * *

If you were to enter the seventy-five year old woman’s apartment and study her kitchen, you would grasp that years do not float on her dishwater. That the glasses and bowls mold over in the sink, in the hue of a meadow. Her dwelling has yellow walls due to the cigarettes she has come to smoke. Your eyes would catch the significant white gaps upon these walls where paintings and photos had once hung.

She has eight cats, two of them knocked-up and meowing incessantly. The nine-year-old boy who lives down the hall from her secretly plays with paper dolls after Sunday school. On one occasion he tried to kiss his best friend, Cliff, and wore a black-eye for one week, three days, seventeen hours as punishment. He is lonely without Cliff, as we are all lonesome throughout childhood. That desolate space where we grow tiny seething whirlpools from despondency, we craft storm-fronts and galaxies in each puddle observed.

His mother prepares meatloaf in their kitchen, attempting to block out the eternal whining call from the cats at the end of the corridor. She has registered a series of complaints with the Housing Committee, petitioning them to evict the seventy-five year old woman in Apartment 41C. All to no avail. This woman’s husband left her and the boy in order to fuck a girl he’d met on the internet in a Dog Lovers chat-room. He likes having his penis bit during oral sex, sometimes until he goes completely limp from the pain associated with such a traditionally horrendous act. He is as good as gone.

We’re allowed to know the boy’s mother’s name. It is Irene.

Irene hasn’t ever had anal sex because she believes that it spreads disease. For the most part she’s correct. Disease was also the main argument against her husband’s desire to have a dog. She believes that her refusal of said house pet was the sole reason behind her husband’s departure. She is incorrect. She is frigid. She knows her son is gay, but is convinced that this will change if she offers him pornographic magazines. She is also incorrect on this count.

The seventy-five year old woman in Apartment 41C is named Terrie-Anne. She has never liked the freckles on her face, chest, and stomach. She’s always been displeased with the size of her breasts, which are large to the point of hilarity. These biases against her own structure eventually lead her to breast-feed only two of her three children. The third child, whose name we’re also not permitted to know, was fed formula in place of his mother’s milk. This child was set upon by a milk truck when he was seven years old and Terrie-Anne charges his death on her decision to pull him away from her body, to keep him at arm’s length due to her own inoperable and echoed anxiety.

All of these people are falling in two, slipping in mud as they hold onto their confusions with religious deliberation and fervor.

It’s sad, really.

* * *

soft rock music pours out of the bar’s door as one patron exits and another enters, a nightly drinker here named Gunther who has the habit of calling me Gubba though I’ve never been positive if Gunther is his first or last name and my interest in learning any more about him don’t really exist, but here we sit Gunther and Gubba, the both of us with names of no accord or origin and I’ve assumed he gave me this nickname due to my body which lays in heavy expanses of flesh that compromise my mobility and also in turn compromise my stomach and torso and if I’m thirsty Gunther offers to buy me a beer which comes lukewarm out of the tap and well on its way to going bad. He knows I only need two beers maybe three and I’m fall-down grade-school wasted and I feel so sorry for myself that he starts to harass me due to what he’s told me he sees as a weakness of will, though when he said it he was quite inebriated and unaware that he was letting any cat out of any bag, which he was because he also told me he’d like for me to suck his cock – he said it in just those words – “suck my cock” – and his beard was stuck full of cigar ash and it covers quite the collection of pockmarks which lead down to his chest which is connected to the rest of his body which, as he told me what he’d liked to do, was sitting angrily on a barstool, his head rested below a dartboard and the jukebox burping up Sam Cooke in the corner as I tell him “Okay. I'll suck it. Just this one time.”

* * *

It has been three months, zero weeks, three days since she last bathed.

Terrie-Anne is shopping for cabbage and turnip, for almonds and prune juice. Her cart is full of bland, honest food. She purchases a copy of People magazine and the local newspaper. She tells the girl behind the check-out counter that her granddaughter is in the paper for being on the honor roll. The clerk, this skinny pimpled girl about sixteen, ignores her and thinks about what it would feel like to go down on her stepfather, a man named Randy. That’s the only time Randy’s is mentioned in any of this. Terrie-Anne’s brother’s name will not be mentioned. There are certain things we’re simply not fit to hear, so we’ll just have to close our eyes tight enough they break in order to learn our way around.

She stares through the girl. The girl is looking back. Terrie-Anne wasn’t telling the truth, anyway. She doesn’t have any grandchildren. Not that it matters. A seventy-five year old woman knows when she is being ignored. She looks at the wall clock. It’s nearly time.

She imagines crushing the sixteen-year-old clerk’s head with a mallet. This brings a smile to her lips. “Have a nice day, sweetie,” she says.

OH, WE'RE SUCH THREATENED KINGS

I am careless with her bad news.

To hold a hot ladle and drink fully is station one, where we arrive and shortly depart without our shoelaces and our lunch-pails. We are sick to be so frozen in magnetic positions, legs wild and strangely akimbo. My own are feelers - that they walk and shoot purpose towards my knees like wooden bullets.

The first time I saw station two, every root system beneath my feet drowned. To play a violin on Tuesday, to wear a feather behind my ear. To cut my toenails daily, to step left foot left foot right foot left foot left foot right foot. Here the wind caught me in full dance, disrobed, simple, complete.

A third station, some have said, is entirely unecessary. A station pale and born splicing fingernails into film. "Ha-ha!" every single fisherman with grey hair screams by the wharf. "Now we're getting somewhere!"

I have been stations one & two with better intentions gumming on dry forks.
I have been spoons & bowls, and will continue to be until I am full.

PREGNANT WITH COBWEBS

I say: laugh at my ulcers, that honor is an afterthought,
that I am a storied dogfight.

Keep in mind:
I
am
also a
haunted
house.

The yard beyond these windows tilts to a side
(the right) and slowly draws itself in, larger than space, as if it seeks
to fill three lungs. The caretaker burns a pile of leaves out front, he is
pretending they are garbage bags full of love letters and used condoms.
Likewise, the air is magnetic & smells like a junkyard.
My walls still need to be painted. My eaves are pregnant with cobwebs stuck
like first cumshots, held in this way by the attic, bedrooms, basement.
There is the unwashed bacon pan from this morning clogging my sink in
the way of arteries, that I am arterial & weep without due sensation.
Here my floors need to be shined and cared, the dead pigeon in the
chimney mistakes itself for an ashtray and writes letters home in crayon.
This is a house that digests.
A foundation better made of bricks, sides of the home unfinished, an opened
can of motor oil spills in the garage, black liquid sheepish and spying
itself wasted. A female mark upon the floor, cement stained and lying
on the telephone to her ex-husband.
Late what I have seen and joyful long sleep to you.

Today somebody asked me what "surplus" meant and I couldn't help but tear his house down.

So laugh until your stitches split,
content when you're faced with red wine.
Keep laughing - make this one count beyond any other.