I’ve seen so many channel zero nuzzles
I’m starting to swallow what they sell.
Whenever I see two people touching,
I used to believe
Her mother taught her to redeem baby birds after a storm.
Now I think
Maybe she just likes the way skin feels,
Wants to love and be loved.
Maybe the shock of warmth spreading across her body
Like a hatful of baby spiders
Feels good.

I look over the shoulders of openhearted men
And know my Siamese twin
My missing rib
Waits for me.
But nonsmokers in sticky bathrooms
Legislated my submission to her cancer.
They told me that every kiss of her black leaf was sick,
That when my spirits fell
I should wait for human hands to raise them.
And since I learned to hide her
I have been disappearing behind that fig leaf too.

Walking a mile in someone else’s strings
Works for people like me, and for aliens.
I know if I read something ugly in God
I would have the strength to cut that cord.
And it’s more fun to play radical sympathy for speechless murderers
Than homophobes
Or uncanny donkeys who are still half boy.
Whatever that cricket whispered to them,
He left them in a lions’ den.
Monsters, like heroes, don’t need a guide.
They will forever leave
A single trail of footprints in the sand.

I’m just not fast enough to have opinions on current events. I prefer to chip away at things on my own time, after everything has been said. But I loved this article, because the people who stand around on the sidelines of marathons doing wacky things to make us smile DO make me love the whole world.
 By the way, anyone local to North Carolina should stop by the Sunday memorial run.

 
 
 
When he stands real still in that stained glass
Lets me hate him till sweat drips down the spandrel of my chin church
Hate him till I cut my hands
Hate him with my spine
I forget what he has done
And he makes me feel good.

Hidden in a violent delta,
I use what’s in my pants to get back at the world.
So a naked girl is my archetype for evil.
I knead women
Try to make them small enough
For the ovens in my eyes.

 
 
 Plus a friend turned me on to Lana Del Rey’s cover of Chelsea Hotel #2. Enjoy!

It’s not that I won’t
Rub sugar in the wounds of friendship
If I must.
Just that I want you to care
Whether or not I want a hug.
If I told you I’d rather
Shake hands than hug
Listen than gossip
Lie with my smile than cry
Live alone
Than pick partners like pictures from a tattoo parlor wall
Would you please not remind me
That I am not enough for the world?
That I will always owe it my body?
Maybe if it would slow down instead of fumbling for me drunk
I would want it too.

 
 
 
Oh yeah, how is it that I have lived this long without hearing this song?

It might be that suffering proves
God’s love is the well-wishing
Of a drunk sitting all day on someone else’s stoop
Caring deeply about the creatures flitting past
But not deeply enough to move.
It might be that suffering shows
That we need pain to know good.
I don’t know what good is,
But if that’s true
Did God make that call?
If so, he is my enemy.
If not, then is it a logical necessity?
If not, then God does not exist.
If so, then of course
God made the earth
And now he has to lie in it.

Tilt at the tiny windmills of my teeth.
I don’t have time for your dislike.
There aren’t enough Atlas shrugs
To release me from my mother’s lust for pity.
So I keep my little skin too tight
Because only bag ladies are allowed to be comfortable.
Only in a trailer can you tell the truth about who you are inside.
At night I tighten my tiny teeth
Lock my smile behind bars
Unplug my perfect feng shui hair
Unload the sugar bullets from my eyes
And check off another chilly Napoleon success:
A day without becoming a drug overdose
Burger King layoff
Pregnant teen suicide.
A day without jumping
Into the fountainhead below.

A binary star system in bars,
I wear women like plastic beads I can discard.
My orientation, obscured behind suits and boots
Renders them impotent.
A whiskey-perfumed nebula of need to which I am blind
Because I thought it was not me.
But when my clothes,
My hair,
My speech
Are eclipsed by the opaque Internet
The women still smell
My precarious gender.

Time flies too close to the sun
This near the asphalt
I want to be a nun.
But gods are just people
Always too close.
At mile 14, I fell away from my last friend.
I was afraid I would escape.
At mile 21, a church saved me
With cool water and Christ
But at such scale, even a tiny cup weighs a ton.
At mile 24, a song
Singed me gently like hot wax
And I learned
No one can cry
If they are chewing gum.