Your love is a bloody knee fighting into the ladies room.

Blinking blindly with your open skin,
so wet and cold
but you can't find the right door
and now you're thrown into a corridor of
swampy broken stalls,
filled with greased and
swampy broken solicitors,
and no one,
no one
even has a god damn roll.

It made him a man with legs that turned and hands that gripped
Took him around the corner, towards the end it dropped us off
and he shakes
Made him a man with smooth turns and oil and work shirts in the trunk,
a lady by his side dressed and dancing with her new purse
Years ago it was his motorcycle and also
a car and all the neighbors spit and thought of
Jew money
Before, a man with keys in his pocket a wallet in the back
a pack of cigarettes but he quit and loves
us forever and here is this man in his bed asking his daughter where she’s been
since last month

if you can survive tonight I will give you the greatest chair
let you hang on my shoulder
keep close against my leg
i will clean you from the outside in

if you survive tonight your hands won't be torn off by that great white truck
i assure you
if you can survive tonight i will stick carnations into the thin of your skin

please survive the night
you can keep my feet warm if you'd like to

if you survive this night you won't have your ass punched
swiped into shit and muck and feathers and spit
keep tumbling for just this night
i can clean you from the outside in

Can't buy a post card at a bar

Christ,

he's been bombarded by three,

barraged by accusations of impropriety.

Nine days to

lay, find, sleep,

C

O

L

L

A

P

S

E ,

hunt for masked charms in all that dust.

august offers

"here, smell this..."

the heat rose up like a sugar fire

the heat came out and punched my rights

hairless and pink

soft, and juicy on the

inside

07.28.10

those shredders still haunt the air

dark, foreign,

near

a haunting deserving of bars and thorned black locks

skin, hair,

that dark corner under your bed

your bed

our bed

your bed

bed

sparked cardboard, my fingers

shred

early November '09.

back to when our dates were chaperoned and your hair waved long

over museum hand-held excuses, an ocean of bloody coral reef rippling, bubbling

between our new palms

under borrowed sheets, quietly testing their courage, circling

the swans you conquered that night by the bay

when i was less worried about old hearts,

better, then,

gentle, as how to best hold yours