over cocoa

The if I go becomes when. Do you want to spend the last ten years differently. Do you want to live in nickel slots, corrugated housing, bad manners. Dust bunnies and fingernail moons the color of old grease. The happy face of the parabola, but you've got that upside down. Well. Shit. The words bedded by pins to black velvet. Everything about you a fashion accessory. The retaught way to walk. It was neither the temperature nor the season for a scarf, but you went there anyway. The stupid places I would never have dreamed of stopping. Idiotsville. Fucktown. The shitfaced sidewalk. You awaken from a dream into another dream. You rise from a dream of water into a dream of walking. Madly populated by willows. Unsympathetic tigers. Seconds to live, seconds to live.

whiskeyface, I saw you in the face of three-fucked up kids, in a softer amulet, softer than the bones we were born with. they trailed out lying about things they liked in phrases learned on the voyage to the new world. where did they learn those words. who taught them to say “I love that boy” as if someone else felt that love, as if the way we try to walk was a distance in itself, four walls for every room calling out incantations unlit, a small bladder, and the door to the café letting in the coming cold. are you like them whiskyface, or is that the command you hear in some voices, a repeated sample, a regurgitation, a liquid sacrifice that helps us from the lunch table to the cement to the car to the chant that says this is monday, an extraordinary best seller which is always ending just to come around again gone.

Cannanes - We Drink Bitter

The 30-minute train and the 30-year blow

Crosswalk boots. The lost collar. Excuse me
may I. He sits and shortly thereafter it's his twin.
At some point in the steady fill
you reconsider your decision.
If you were a roof what color
would be your shingles.
The words fly up the mountain.
I love you like copper.
Like rungs nailed into telephone poles.
Equal divisions of light.
In the bird's flight
a heavy reliance on feathers.
You told me you didn't believe in the distance.
I countered with window bars,
the compost box,
an interpretive charley horse in the sheets.
Three blocks to the wind and everyone a brown garage.
The old woman moaning in pain:
The __________, she explained.
Light sockets and eyes.
The world a retarded symphony.
The largest conceivable saxophone and no chance of reeds.
But! Plenty of step ladders and hats.
If you are the car, I am the yellow medallion.
And exactly what good is the yellow medallion, you ask.
Exactly no good whatsoever, I reply.

Shyness is nice

Plastic gray shoes.
Cinder block smiles.
I never asked to be cognizant.

All this wanting flutters around like a moth.
All this sleeping keeps
making me awake.
I never asked
to be the woman in the hat,
the dog in the bag,
the mouse on the cat on the dog.

I never asked to have bones.

I asked for two tickets, Eddie Money style.
I asked for two tickets and a wonderful life, although not necessarily
in that order.
I asked for a slight cessation in stupidity,
a better blender, or lacking that, a
better blended drink.
A woman to love me forever. Snap!

I never asked for wings, although if
given the opportunity I
would like to revise my list and
ask for wings.

Yearn upwards, yearn down.

I never asked for a good haircut, nor the hair
in pair to inform it, bigger muscles, a more dashing
line to my spine.
But we may safely take that as a given.
Much like: human
avarice, artifact worship, and termites.
AKA the overwhelming desire
to gnaw.

Against rising water we built the ark.
Against obliteration we capsule-pack seeds.

I never asked for double-edged tape,
fingerprintless glasses, life
without smudge.

Why is the idea of an apocalypse not
completely distasteful to me?

In another life you
are the samurai, the
inventor of the light bulb, the best
stone-skipper to come out of Derry in the
last 50 years. In another life I am the
housewife, a hang glider, the undisputed master
of the abacus.

I never asked for what wasn't.
I never asked you
to masturbate away hope.

Switzerland (Unmixed)

The door opens up
and in walks the
angel of death
looks just like a friend.

I took the pills
I took the pills
I took the pills
so why can't I sleep?

(Hope & Suicide, 2007)