Haiku #11

some translucent flesh,
shock red and sculpted flat
splayed into a maple leaf

Senryu #26

I knew a girl with
sixteen fingers and only
nine of them were hers

She Masturbates Standing Up:

she will turn to the bathroom mirror when she comes
although she will not open her eyes.

I know this without needing to
because I've seen her talking with strangers.

Each room in this house has a vase
and each vase holds an inch of molding water
because we threw their flowers all away.
We could not bear them.

A fist inside my chest continues to close.
She believes this to be my heart
and it might as well be.

The monstrous leaves of an alien autumn clatter;
theirs is a purposeless noise
and even the smokes of their burnings
will not influence me.

At night, though, I cannot help but hear
the scraping from below, the porcelain pulse
she insinuates and the moan within my own tangled ribs;
strange music, this, but not difficult to memorize.

Imagine the circle of moisture collecting on
her reflected face.


Tyounyi, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1989

Making Love in the Meat Locker

It was blood ice and a kind of fog
that rolls down from a panting mouth,
The quick chill of saliva and human oil
against the atmosphere
Her hands against the metal shelves
and frost
Her hands sliding down the ribs, the flanks
of hollow pigs
our full weight in her arms
The scratching ache as she dragged her nails
through a hoarfrost of slaughter
The resonance of frozen concrete and how sound carries
when I turn my face to it
when I close my eyes against it
when I come

To eat the bodies of others is to eat death.

Please, we say,
more of everything, please.

She would wake from her nightmares and

angry, she would carry her emotion
against him, against whom she had dreamed,
against whom she'd dreamed badly.

Sleep soft palms slapping him,
his shape there next to hers in a black iron bed,
with barely formed
groans of strange words,
words like "blue"
and "steam ship"
and "corridor"
and, until she woke,
their meaning was clear and
when she wakes all that is left her is the sadness of the dream
and there is no comfort in embrace.

The dry sound of them panting confusion
is a metronome for the movement again
and back toward another kind of sleep.

Narcophobia

(diminishing form #23)

And it’s those kind of nights again
locked up inside a tired skull
that begs to betray with foul dreams and dark sweating sheet tangling thrashing
so cigarettes and coffee and cocaine aren’t helping
can only help so much

the reversed landscape on the ceiling
those cracks and shadows in the plaster
are difficult for these failing eyes
to travel again

I am wishing for a new vista
but that is not a possibility
not tonight

a field of light begins to grow
in what I suppose must be the eastern sky

too little too late too often

Diminishing Form #34

Cesarean and Scoliosus
work the phones and bones
and go out late at night
to fuck the men
who call them on the phone to come over

And it’s hotels and motels and holiday inns
and they are always blond
because that’s what they want
the men who want the blond girls

And it’s babies at home
and grandmas and girlfriends
and boyfriends going to jail

There are all of us
under the downtown lights

exchanging currency we made up in our heads