First drag of a cigarette
it feels like
four street lights in a row

Like symmetry.

Broken capillaries -
a bruise blooming

The thought of cousin Mary
and the image of a Sunday School teacher

As if you could learn how to be
infinitesimally small.

Typing bullshit now -

The arc of time
slowly receding
beneath words thought out.

One line in my head and I stumble.

spines on the bookshelf
while I put my ego into an epitaph

Three lines and a sound

(One more year like this in Paris
and something in me would have
rusted forever)

How strange it is to be
motivated by friction.

With broken morals expressed
as breath upon my neck.

Eaten alive on a summer’s night,
my back and chest a mirrored sky -
thirty thousand feet above the scene,
while I’m tracing out the constellations
of bug-bites and immodesty
given little thought to at the time.

Today I bought some cheap water colours and watched Woody Allen’s “Manhattan”

Pretty stellar. I love the dreamlike quality of the bleeding paint. It is even better if you just cut a swathe of colour through the page, let it dry, and put the whole thing through the typewriter.

It is just beautiful to see the colours and shapes all flowing together, with words over top of the whole thing. I think I’ll be practicing this form of integrated writing off and on through the summer.

My typewriter might need a new ribbon. I have elk steaks marinating in the fridge.
And Henry Miller before bed.

When you start to live in the present everything is so mysterious. Like skeleton keys, or the sound of the furnace when you are young. Boyhood impetuosity grows with the length of your shadow on these summer nights.

I could do anything given a long enough summer.

Every two years I fall
in love with the memory
of someone I used to know.

In three days I’ll be in Sweden
with old friends and time
for nothing but nothing.

Breaking up ideas
into stanzas and lines
is fun.

Listening to the soft acoustics of cement.
And the sound of fruit ripening.

Ha! Being serious for the sake of being.
Serious.

Just play around.

No time,
no time.

Heading out the door,
One second!

Wait.
Where’s that list?

Always losing time
never finding it.

Who needs reason,
who needs rhyme?
Today is annihilation
and yesterday
came on time.

This is a celebration of the self!

That eruption of the pan
and stand
of that destructive
muffin top.

Little Whitmans all of you,
with your icing, icing,
icing.

So when I’m mixing up,
that beauty batter,
I’m less myself and more -
the whole of everything.

“He’s a poet”

a bystander calmly replies
when asked if I’d be
All Right

As if sleeping in the corner
of an unfurnished apartment

                                    (two friends, fists flying
                                     drunkenly make their
                                     voices heard)

Was the whole
of my problems.

And again I’m waking up,
hard truths on hardwood.
Learning that it’s the same party

over and over again.

Broken symbol,
half-hanging like the trapeze artist
spitting at gravity,
scraping against the underside
of the moon.

It took fourteen long years
before my husband could read my writing.
Six years later and he is still
working on the hieroglyphics of my face.

Each week I’m living like a hyphen,
razor wire taut
and lost
between the words I’m writing down.

They say if I eat healthy,
drink and sleep and live and fuck
without the manufactured steam
that keeps this four-chambered
combustion engine purposeful

I can be happy.

See my linear Me
stretch almost endlessly
towards some brighter future.

So I eat all these words -
antioxidant, probiotic,
the vitamin alphabet.

What am I aiming for?

If my fragile shell
were to find its mark
in this field or the next
would it marr the landscape any less?

My trajectory is unknown.

So I eat.
And eat.