I have a recurring vision
of me on the ground
twisting string in my fingers,
delirious and the street
lights have exploded and
I swear I can’t breathe,
I swear I’m not forsaken,
I swear I renounce all evil in me.
tell him that my legs are jelly.
sir, I cannot walk anymore,
I repeat to EMT that refuses to
give me oxygen and
you materialize, screaming
I am praying for you.
you are not making it happen.
you are seeing it first. 

wait, back up,
that’s too complex.
the little girl is doing
cartwheels in front of a small
blond child but when she sees
me looking again.  she skips in
a circle and smiles.

I know never to bet on
anything that talks
so I push the whole thing
aside, keep walking,
feel a bone in my knees
bend.

“nine of wands”

I start taking wagers on who
shows back up first
knowing it’s wrong to bet
on anything that talks
and quite frankly,
you can’t,
Mrs. Shepherd told me in the 12th grade
during AP stats, still proud I aced that
class but you can’t stop
a sociopath
from never feeling again,
can you?
I say to him.
I have a Smith and Wesson.

but I add
people think angels can’t have
guns and
that’s not true,
hand him the weapon.
we just can’t fire them.
hold it.
get comfortable with it.

pink collar says
PRINCESS, I’m wearing
antlers and a dirty blonde
wig.  mock latex bodysuit
that rides my hips and
I am
only half bitch
three inches from you
on the bed and
half loading bb bullets
in the cartridge and
plainly  drawing up
variables marked
xxx.

laugh out loud
cuz they
don’t really get it yet.
it’s not just execution.
it’s not just
having the arsenal
but where to put it.
pull back my curtain,
show him the basket
with the blue calcite,
the burned scripture,
the crown.

 

“formula #1: inference”

 

there are two giant
bruises on each thigh.
I am careful not to hit them
with my fingers except
I already have
and I shriek.
you don’t even ask.


I spent most of my time
that late winter
searching.
what you would say:
combing through options,
in flux and in search of
weight.
and some guy,

a stranger
in my house, said to me
after I had given him reiki
for money, for rent,
for phone bill,
smirking on my apartment floor:
“Smile.” and added.
“What do you look like naked?”
and added
“How much to see?”

and I stood tall and robust
like a weed in Kensington’s
concrete garden:
stepped on but
won’t go away
and  then
suddenly growing
into a gun.
not only that,
but suddenly
making rent.
fuck.
ok.

you don’t even ask. 

“doors #5”

the first card I pull is the Magician.
say nothing about it.
my couch is stained from cat vomit
and chocolate ice cream
and smells
like fresh linen spray.
I am uncomfortable
at all times, at all
hours of every day
and this is no exception.
I am trying not to look in
the mirror behind  you and
focus on the red wine in the glass,
bottle on altar, not comment
on eye color, guess placements without
ado, turning over cards to let you
know.

 

I try to explain to someone one day
what I am seeing in the mirror.
no one is there, I say this first
to myself on a walk
around, pass a little girl in pink dress.
fuck.
a haze, like a fog surrounding my body
begins to build and my voice,
almost like it’s been previously
recorded and then played back,
comes through me and I have to
repeat what she says.
but sometimes the track is off
so I am two seconds ahead of myself
and it’s hard to watch.

 

wait, stop, back
up. I’m muttering I think.
too complex.
stop myself when her brother looks.
no, don’t tell him that.

Australia looks better than Alaska.
that’s all I say.
we have some wands between us.
that’s all.
keep it to myself:
predicting
deaths of
others
and also
practicing
hugging people
when they walk
in the room.

 

“the magician”

I’m a sociopath,
I practice in the car window.
it’s 92 degrees and I
am only half melt,
half kept a bitch
in a yard but
with a water bowl,
no chain. polyester
pink collar says “PRINCESS”
watching the screen door from eight
am to nine dark.
see if they’ll wave me in.
there are two kids with snow
cones dripping down their arms
nearby. I smile
you sneer.

 

he wants to know everything.
I tell him everything,
I say, turning towards the
young girl.
she is wearing a pink dress,
has long uncombed brown hair,
stick legs, her older brother nearby
and is taken by
my insouciance.
my foul mouth that
yelled fuck
earlier for no reason.
my centipede tattoo.
he takes her sticky hand
and they race to the swings.
she turns to see if I’m still
wavering in the sun.
truth is, I’m actually
six feet in the ground
and only children can see
parallel lines.
I smile.

 

I’m wearing a mask,
not touching a thing,
sweltering. practicing
honesty.
practicing
hugging
people
when
they
walk
in the room.

 

“affection”

when you find me
I am sitting on the dirt
twisting  a mask
in my fingers
and you could not catch
what I said only that it
was muttered,
repeated and there is something
not quite vapid about me,
but lost and then
filled with something
else. the first thing I say to you
is it’s torrential.
I expect you to know what to say
back. 

are my hands changing colors?
 I examine them myself,
fingers spread, string
around index, mouth cover
dangling.
I expect you to know what
to say back. 

“Carey”

(this is for house of leaves circa 2013)

there’s this girl I killed.


she’s dancing for me
in black:
black blindfold,
black panties,
black fingernails
scratching at my larynx
pulling questions from my lips.
she wears a morose and
cloying smile.

the hallway is closing in on her:
it is inches from her bare breasts
speckled with black marks, charred
from spare matches when she conflated
masochism with trust
long before I ever came along.

when uncloaked, I breathe in
her sterility     a virescent mass
growing from her chest;
toxic moss that threatens the whole garden
everytime she hoped
her wounds would be given a sadist
to hold them.
her eyes fall on mine like heavy snow
in spring: it blinds,
it’s unexpected and
unfortunate,
damages everything
nascent in the ground
and causes wrecks,
she says to me.

     

             it’s like the way the moon drives men
                      to madness when she finally
                        disrobes, as she goes and sings

  and stings with her guardian tail,
her ferocious sadness,
her ubiquitous laughter
never seen, heard everywhere.
she should have grown tulips
shaped like daughters,
but instead slashes at them
like a God on fire
begging to be humanized,
touched with bare hands,
begging to be boxed
one last time.
       it causes wrecks

each time she smiles,
she is gnashing teeth.
she is twirling.
she is pouring it out in blizzards.
when she cries,
she is screaming.
when she wakes up
      it causes wrecks.

there’s this girl I killed.

the blossoms are frozen.
everyone is celebrating a
resurrection of water
and she’s thirsty,
she’s sunk,
evaporated and coming back to haunt;
raining like God,
Sisyphus.
a storm of a kind that
wears the equator;
how she bore the world
on her spine.

there’s a crack in the world
tonight and
    it causes wrecks
she tells me,
you have opened it.

“the corridor”

 

(transition)

what’s it like looking east to west
and men for miles?

but nice smile.

small.
unmonitored fidgeting.
nervous laughter.
seems to force her way through small
talk and presents as
calm but quite fanatical
about some previous existential
crisis that she says
was“indelible.”

she doesn’t show me her skin
or much of her teeth when I
am watching. she’s
currently being touched and
it seems,
does not like to be touched without
motive.
she is currently being undressed.


she is currently turning from ice
to flood,
to steady stream of
cold, red blood
and asked me to sing this
last part out loud.

 

“how guys save me in their phone”

in Boulder,
it was the same reason.
it was called “Unity.”
I was invited by a girlfriend.
we talked a lot about
life and mysticism,
the way currents showed up
for us. I wish I had
documented more of the tension
of the room. like the gratitude meeting,
I stayed with meetings that forced
everyone to share.

they went in a circle.

I sat in a room
among them, mostly
men, always mostly men:
some young,
some old and reluctantly,
shared when it was my turn,
becoming chair,
inviting others. 

once I remember saying
I can be really manipulative
and a guy that I had reached
out to about something,
never responding,
made eyes at his sponsor.

at the risk of being
labeled shrewd,
I still liked being seen. 

“unity”

I used to
leave class
in high school,
go to the bathroom stall
and masturbate whenever
I let dirty thoughts
build too long.
usually it wasn’t
the subject of the class
but the way a boy
brushed my sleeve
on the way to pick up
the beakers.

I used to ask men
to reach under blankets
at house parties
and touch me.
my shorts not so
tight they couldn’t
be pushed to one side.
I used to pay their
way in when there
was a cover,
crawl up
their stomachs,
my mouth smelling
of Bud Light and
cigarettes and smiling
bright asking them
if they were still seeing
Mariel and if they wanted
to reach under the
blankets.

I always had a spare
five dollars on hand,
at least three cigarettes
and a way to materialize
fire, a way to morph
into lap cat
for whomever I
craved.  my name
is a whispered name.
a baleful sweep
of syllable in halls.

“the rooms”

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