You Are Everyone

Submitting to have a manuscript published tomorrow, fingers crossed, leg snapped, luck in a pile of digital paper.

Take it back to the counter, remove the peel,
bend the tail into knotted timeline and the
promise will look like goosebump blush. The

smile will not hang like crescent moon but
glow like lambent flesh. Running wicked with

the idea of love, with dopamine and finger-
print gold. Track marks from the door
to the kitchen tell you that yesterday

needs remembering. What you’re left with
is either perfect or it isn’t. Chances are
it is. If you will, believe that the end isn’t

possible and that again, the skin will warm. 

A blank space in your brush stroke and I’m pulling
the seal at the peak of your amber protein. I am

finding the places where we dream together about
animals with no eyes and too many teeth. The hum

of wild washes clean impurity. We are toddlers
questioning the air with full throttle grins. Breaking

back the walls and opening land into silk mesh.
Who calls our name, winds & breathes but doesn’t listen

and we see them at the end of distance drinking
chalk dust, when the chest heaves with hunger,

and the emptiness becomes communal sacrifice,
the dead rising like the split bone of home.  

Behind the door, paradise, a platform for time
to stretch and give us memory. Memory of

parents that pulled apart to keep their children
together, of blood loose in an midnight ambulance,
of carriages made from fingers, of blue salt that
stings us clean, of the first time we sewed our-
selves into the cloth of each others eyes and I
couldn’t stand to blink away from you. This is when

the roiling folds of valley talk flatten into commitment 
and the blessed bless the best in us. I will hold your

head like a ball of neon light when the crimes seep through
pores like sour sickness. The world didn’t mean to 
disbelieve. The rest didn’t mean to fall like leaves from
branches that hang like the arms of starving children.

You were a blooming burst of energy, swirling through
dark matter and flipping the tombs like resurrected
beams of balance. Here with perfect sight, I am
hardening, chrysalis shell and harrowing, feeding
whatever parts of myself I can spare to the parts
of you that went missing when the light struck. 

I am stumbling and making moons with 
money alongside the smoke shop
that sells us to them. I am growing

forward with stubble and destined
to whiten like bleached cotton.
Where face meets fortune I crawl
from the tunnel spun through
the fingers of the woman who
spoke of the interconnectedness
of all things and I believe her.

Just like I believe that love is
falling into the lake we hold hands
in gravity around. And it’s the page
I dog-eared and promised to read
to you when the pills couldn’t
sate your undying urge to soften

and collapse simultaneously. There
is heart and pressure and vortex
in speaking to eachother. The
ground rocks beneath our feet

when we protest our circumstance.
On the table, books and magazines,
pens and notes, schedules that leak
neon into the composite structure.

I will not cease to flow through
the current of awareness. Gleaning
the knowledge of a prophets flippant
pallet. Passing equations filled with

probable ambiguity through the
mail slot cut through your sternum.
The day we die, we will know that

success, the filigree finish line, is
not a burden, but a story that unfolds
like fingers when we greet. 

Makin’ Moves

Haven’t been able to post anything new in a good while but I should be back with some new stuff soon. Otherwise, just found out an poetry anthology I was published in just got reviewed by the NY Times! A good review!

You are the world, and I love it.

a bit of prose to minimize boredom

 Ghost gray in the face. A million miles of asphalt press on and roll back underneath our cushioned seats. The state of Florida has promised me at least a six hour drive. My friends have promised me two or three different kind of drugs that I can drive on, no problem. Their eyes all sink into each other and I don’t question it. 

I really can’t tell if I’m driving at this junction. My hands, fingers splayed are most likely on some circular shape like the arch of an electric back. My electric back is a flicker and then darkness but I still ride on through the sludge of methadone gear-shift and drive. Holy is this trip. A gun under every seat. All loaded with metal fingers. Point to kill because in this society, with the sirens of wailing coppers blaring eternally in the humdrum of daily monotony. 

We break the system. We break it by accepting it, eating it, and shitting onto a plate for wealthy diners. Our shit tastes like avant garde rubbish and its worth it’s weight in endangered creature fur. Our shit is neavou.

From the backseat, buried in mounds of balled up poems I wrote, and the hands of someone else I borrowed refused their brilliance. From the back seat they seem to skirt around the perfection they so deserve, but I’m stoned on laced weed and a couple of meth tabs so poetry is running laps in the periphery of my psyche.

“Anyone gotta piss? I feel like there’s a horde of dancing gypsies in my bladder screaming shit until the pressure builds and they all explode. It’s like that. Anyone gotta piss?” I turn like a flesh-stacked skeleton and shoot my brain into Tyler’s face. Pull the steel onto the side of the road, I say. Leak your fullness into a bush, dude, the world is our toilet. Anyone says different probably cleans their ass with a bowl that spits water at the murky center of their shitters. 

“I’m pullin’ over.”

“That’s right Tyler, you expel those wicked travelers in a golden shower. I’ll stay here. Keep guard. Smoke some more pot.” I hold up my hand. In my hand pressed between my fingers I hold a neon green joint. I covered it in highlighter.

“Pass it here, I’m not hungry.” This spoken by Melissa. Melissa hangs around us like a leech and we like it. Me and Tyler have both buried ourselves in Melissa’s gapping presence. She loves the love. We don’t love her but we do. Nobody is together. We ride the waves of astral highway, together and bleeding for more. Anything besides the distance we leave behind us, spreads into a frenzy of drug induced experience. 

I once broke my dick. I didn’t have it checked so it healed, a dick once more. Melissa tells me, after eyeing my flaccid member, head tilted asunder, eyes bending outwards to collect every detail of my immoral display. 

“I don’t think you can break your dick. I mean, I bet you can. But, what I mean is, really, you probably didn’t break your dick. And it probably didn’t heal because it probably wasn’t broken, y’know. I mean, I could be wrong or some shit. But your cock looks fine and I’m sure it functions. We’ll find out later.” The promise of future laying has instilled in me a fresh excitement for the trip ahead. Upwards and onwards, we should be on our way to the center of Florida, in the heart of redneck America, a haven of cultural shit and a melting pot for scum and ozone, taste me and spit me back out. We plan on being swished around the cankerous mouth of the great city of Orlando.