marilyn hold free version
sunday at the time of death
your shadow is a pearl turning for nobody
the bars are full
in the air saturday’s rough cloth holds
the noise a grid of cigarette butts and rouge
other people’s voices a wall of nails
and the soccer game’s volume exceeds the decibel
of men crying over an easy girl
sunday at the time of the scandal
there’s an imprecise change of speed
and the minutes slide their cow gaze
over your tender grass
at the next table a couple breaks
the evening in pieces
and a glass-shard halo soaks the tablecloth
I thought of those arms
sunday at the time of death
as though it were otherwise
lovers’ manual
I gave you a tiny jewel
a scaled sapphire in a fish’s body
and you let it
fall in the passing of things
full nelson
how do you do it?
didn’t you know that love after forty is an unfeasible concept
like forming an alloy from a flexible field and a totalitarian material
a sterile defiance marking a billboard message on your forehead
you go down the street the word never between your eyes
and everyone reads how you eat from the pot
sleep alone
wail against the medicine cabinet
sundays thinking of killing yourself
mondays cursing your lack of courage
on tuesday you get it together
friday you go somewhere where people know each other
but you feel like a shard of glass
a post
a layer of dust between the hubbub and the night?
everyone else kissing each other on the mouth
laughing and hugging like the world’s about to collapse
or like all that mattered was beginning
maybe the membrane that joins youth and beauty
gets torn by friction
you
how do you do it?
0-800 suicide hotline
- if you would like to purchase our new products press one
- 1
- firearms press one chemical products press two the new arsenic menthol combo press three to speak with tech support press four
- 4
- all our operators are busy
last scales
at inventory time silence is solid
bare counter
buried box to hide his photos
and turn down the volume of his voice
two animals in the same cage mate or kill each other
you learn to react on the fly
tiny lost fish in the bedroom let their last scales drop
I go barefoot in the house’s bones
and the water’s rusty drip doesn’t let me sleep
time to replace the material
skin rests like a chalkboard erased
or a living room cleaned
the shark fin*********removed from the shark
all at once looks inoffensive
I’m not interested in the truth
I’m gonna make these tin-can days pay in gold
0-800 suicide hotline take 2
- zero eight hundred etcetera
- the number you are trying to reach is currently busy
leave your message after the beep
if you
if your word forging
a path through the static rain
like a fish dredging the depths
like a noose
if you
if my name leaving your lips
traveled along the wires until filling me
with it
becoming complete
in me
if you uttered me
if your tongue vibrated between your lips far
out there
and from that small effort came
the illusion of being
here
if you
if your eyes saw any thing
yet I’d swim you
inside
until I fit
another minute into this life
it’s back
if you don’t hand over the pillow feathers
it coats your face with tar
and you dream of a mercury angel
who sews your lips closed with a thread of fire
nothing reaches it
there are bits of shipwreck in my underwear
nails caught up in my silk stockings
if you don’t hand them over it throws you to next winter
against the bedsprings
it wants your heart on a platter
the pearls of your eyes to fashion a necklace
it’s back
rubbing its fur in a sign of triumph
against the coming days
each morning
I do it as though a wild miracle
were about to happen
with one foot on the doorstep of defeat
and another in the alley of insanity
I do it dirtying the truth
working around the edges of a tiny secret
I do it in gaps of conscience
in bedroom drawers
on the breakfast table
I do it unwavering
with a fanatic’s persistence
and a panhandler’s greed
I do it slowly
without innocence
I sink my fingers each morning into the shit
searching for a reason to live
I fail and I do it
and fail
and do it