these date from four months ago, I think.
I think they were meant to go together, but now I haven't the faintest.
Old work like this tends to be longer-winded.
My apologies.

-----------------------------


Interesting
interesting
this drinkers got her drinks cut out for her,
like patterns of spills on cloth
your death shroud round around you
tell me now you sweet thing
spell the words
the sent text a shrill of something you kind of meant
a spill,
the shot,
the kill.
I’d die for less.
Write me drunk honey
I’ll finish up alone my red wine
a shirazi rewrite could be worse

-----------





Interesting
interesting
I’m a chemistry project
a scientific weaving on your needle machine
see the break through when I start to say
it’s okay
I can take all you’ve got
phonographic
turn me on and hear my static charming
This last week
I’ve cleaned out bottles upon bottles at home
lovely reds all, shiraz and merlot,
sangiovese
northern california syrahs
the girls’ got a taste for style
the girls’ got class in her veins
class with a capital k, I joked
barely remembering how you called me
the queen of silences.
now there's a coronation for you
Driven to drinking
someone bleed me of this
before it can begin again
red’s my favorite color.
It’s the most intense, the most passionate
wild and maddened and sublimely joyful and miserable and in love, of them all.
I’ll make all the world match,
drinking it in,
bleeding it out.
Let’s all mix our misspelled metaphors here.
but still alive yeah
and you won’t have my head now
won’t have me as your trophy
take you down and out with my big guns baby
trail it from texas in the route of a wreck,
the wake of a drive
I’m still alive
I’m still alive





posted at 9:16 PM

recalling
a sort of suspension
a liquid, a solid, you can't tell
it doesn't matter
so firecrackered, so traintracked,
I'd have been better off spotting. so marked up.
you couldn't have drawn further on me but no, the arms
the color of busted blueberries and every visitor saying You Look So Good
so great I'll stay here forever then. There is no difference to me between a hospital
and an airplane. modular food, bad tv, an inability to move water too cold to drink
vaguely recall laughing the chess pieces could have levitated the fever dyeing
my eyes red. years later still decaying, got bottles of rocks
to prove it but the blood don't keep so well it's fun
and awful raging on this way, a hot and
maddened run, an altared state,
telling myself this is the sign
that I'm alive...
yeah I know its serious
I know its serious
I know its serious
I so don't care,
you can't pay me off,
give me another diagnosis,
hit me again,
it feels fucking great,
I'm primed to kill
a panther pacing behind bars







posted at 4:39 PM

a bifurcation,
the way it's drawn and
quartered,
take this half and pull it
on through time,
strewing the path with guts all the way,
and left behind
the bits and bobs;
she died on a Friday night,
the last pick-up, the final drop-off
and is survived
by the pages,
some letters,
and collections of words
spit out like from a star far away,
light-years to get to you today,
these sounds generated centuries ago



posted at 3:42 PM

ohhh yeah baby
they put the quarter in me and now I'm on
running a mile a minute,
waving the gun,
remembering every move from kung fu class
taken years ago,
i could come on the keyboard
this computer don't stand a chance
there ain't nothing
so sexy as a deadline




posted at 12:12 PM

so I started this damn country band
'cause punk rock's too hard to sing.
-whiskeytown.


posted at 5:53 PM

a poem for three different people.

khachtryan, a golden gun come on, these words mean nothing, they're pretty. my heart could never home in you, I'm sorry, it's true that it's locked in someone else's bathroom next to the knife I stole. How's it cutting these days, I wonder. You could cut my chest out and I still wouldn't heal right, I know it's true I've tried. taste those iron lines. yes you tasted like it. couldn't tell you I hated you no matter how much you asked me to, because I loved you. so slit my wrists. you know I want it. I know you'd like it, it's your kind of thing, like your endless supply of cigarettes and the pills you take to persist. come on over, we can drink til we're unconscious with ink stains all over the place. digging that poison, aluminum cylinder pyramid piled in the livingroom in the silent morning light. and you staggering down streets somewhere into open traffic.
I made ten thousand mistakes, ten thousand mistakes, and you, you made a million.






posted at 5:38 PM

two a.m., heading north on la brea

now I'm behind you
four right turns
gunned the engine and
what will you do?
what will you do?
a grin on my face
my knife in my shoe
I'm so happy
put you
in your
awful
place




posted at 5:32 PM

life finds you
where ever
you live




posted at 5:27 PM

drag it all out
a cathedralic car wreck
an exhibitionist streak




posted at 5:25 PM

somewhere the night sky hangs like a blanket
shoot it with my cap gun just to make it seem like stars
-whiskeytown.


posted at 12:07 PM

karma
must be
nickel-and-diming me
to death



posted at 4:27 PM

for joe.

you are
a rainy day
when I stay in
purring
you are
the pillows,
the tea-cup,
my fourteen lit candles
you are
the time
sweet and quiet
i never take
for myself
you let me down
like aching arms
that have been trying too long
to hold up
the crushing weight of heaven.

thank you



posted at 8:02 PM

hey wow
you taught me
effectively
to make the poetry
shorter.

what do you have to say for yourself

posted at 7:55 PM

hey lone star
swing that shamble
a tasty eyeful
cockeyed amble
over my way
its a gamble
i know
you drown it
harder
every day
consistent rundown
soul going cold
in this soulless town
bruise my retinas
tell me now
how you work it
how you break it
how you make it
magnetic
to my iron heart

haven't seen you in a while, your adopted town, and to me, to me
you own it
you fucking own it






posted at 7:41 PM

you,
you jessamine,
jacaranda
in a full on violent violet bloom
your fucking city is melting,
the asphalt sagging
hot spell and me feeling all bourgeois,
that a c blasting
the heat waves making marks on the air
and i don't feel cooler
i dont feel better at all.


posted at 7:37 PM

recalling
your hands around my neck
it was a joke
we were laughing
still
felt that stab of alarm
i didn't doubt you could do it


posted at 7:01 PM

and the crushing weight of the sky,
so lovely
so lovely
flatten me to the earth
sink me in and down
life's too lovely

give me that highway one,
that curve of sea,
a first northbound cypress
leaning its body towards the hills



posted at 6:59 PM

the landscape of human suffering,
how it took us in
to its wide depths
its vast expanses
the warm arms of its delicate and detailed topography
where we lost our way and got found,
wide eyed and wild,
by that maddened
rapture

I'll ascend to heaven
on the ladders of the wrists
we each bled dry so beautiful



posted at 6:56 PM

hey there
I'll call you melatonin
for my jetlagged heart



posted at 5:12 PM

the patient pointed knife at low back
felt through the most blissful kisses,
felt in springtime rains,
felt in late afternoons,
in coolly waning childhood,
felt as you rest collapsed and deep-breathing in god's good arms,
has always been and
i guess
ever shall be.
Do we love our doubt
how it makes my mad love
sweeter
Death,
the loss of him,
it never leaves you
the only thing
that won't


posted at 5:07 PM

my hollowed heart,
four-chambered,
echoing rooms
your ghost
inexorcisable
an inexorable progression,
ruthless and degenerative
making of me
a creature occupied and taken
haunted
each cell
held still in memoriam
it is the things that never really start, I see
that never really
let go of me


posted at 5:02 PM

wear that bad habit like a badge of honor
drag it home
take it all off

-------

the stars, the vacuum of space between our toes, the carefully orchestrated division
how we try so hard
to not touch each other.
that distance, i swear
it could contain ten thousand miles
and as many intentions

---------------

i never remember for more than an hour
the things that you say to me
if intentions were horses i'd ride fast and far
and bring each word back home to you.

---------------


"We've never rolled a bus," he said
as the tour guide drove us up the winding side of mount shasta
i was a little girl between my parents on the bench seat.
"They have a tendency to go end over end."


-----------------------


10.12.2001

Noses bleed a lot, did you know? The skin is so thin there.

I didn’t even get a regular nosebleed, nor did I get in a fight;
just an injury, just an external wound, drips bright red oxygenated
blood, iron-rich, down my nose, which, when I look at it for too
long, starts to look overly sturdy, angular, polygonal. The blood
drips so far I actually accidentally inhale it a little, the drip
working its snail-like trail up inside my nostril. Watch it go.
I just stare into the mirror. Too many mirrors in my room. A drip hits the floor.

I will leave in a year.

Take these words, this blood, and mark it now; I’ll smear it across
the screen to make these words stick.

San francisco: a city of lost people. Unlike here; Los Angeles
is a city of the found, the way people are found by traveling evangelists;
a city of the saved and recieving of salvation, the golden light,
redeemed, the overwhelming faith of the converted. Los Angeles
is full of born-again fervency, people who know what they want.
and here I’m the lost one ‘cause I an unilluminated, I am not getting
the gist of salvation. Maybe I'm wanting for a different sort of thing.
but in the north, in a city full of the lost and wandering,
that feeling of the horizon bending you backwards,
the failing and failed, with no more to lose,
maybe I can find meaning.

"What is...salvation?"
"Salvation is when you are saved.
Obviously I don't know the first thing about salvation."
-twilight singers


--------------------------------

----------

Drowning at age seven I recalled
seeing lights that were blue and shifting.
It wasn’t god, no it was
the light slanting through the glassine pool surface.
Jumped into the thing yelling at them all to watch my stupendously wonderous cannonball
which gave off the most awesome splash—
a splash to be proud of,--
forgetting, too late recalling as my tiny arms grabbed at air
I’d left the Floaties behind in the bathroom.
The quick drawing in of one terrified breath three feet above the water, remembering
them sitting right there on the counter in front of the big mirror.
Immersed with a loud bang.
I’d been scared to put my face under til now.
forcibly thrust into these abrupt blue miles
I hung suspended in a sea
where light swam like fish schooling deep under cerulean waves
stunned into opening my eyes, take it all in
pouring into my dazzled retinas,
I stopped struggling
drew deep liquid breaths
realizing I was now fully ready and content to die,
having seen the most lovely sight in all my long seven years,
having seen how beautiful life can become from underneath the white-lit surface, looking up
the way that backyard pool, so tiny seen from above,
became unfolded in one instant to vast endless leagues, latitudes under the glass
and depths unplumbable
a thousand prismatic angles of sky and blue forever
sloshing at the corners of my vision
which then quietly stopped with no realization on my part
that it had ever ended
or that a break had been made from this world.

Waking now from time to time at night and early morning
still imagining the rising back to consciousness,
my mothers’ hands on my back pushing the water out of me,
it dripping from my lips, the most delicious elixir.

Figuring now I’m half mermaid
and always will be,
having swallowed the stuff,
having taken it into my blood.

And when I think all my metaphors are oceanic.



posted at 4:07 PM

3/28/02

i see your goddamned truck
every time I'm on the freeway
which is at least
twice a day
everyone in LA must own one
I could drive for miles and miles
and not escape your ghost



posted at 12:14 PM

at the grasshopper, thursday (4/2002)

and she says I watch you
go off
taking on water
in ten minutes flat
in your diagonal gaze.
Oh yeah, that, I know, it's
not you love
a bit disconcerting,
the way we go on and I cloud up
divisional and excessive, a quiet tablature
tableing it right there
and you gotta keep talking.
I expand to fill the vacant house,
each clapboard echoing
my gaze, watching
you walk through me
like a ghost.
These cloudburst clouds baby
storming up a brew
I gulp all down
keeps me stable
and diffuse feet on the ground
so pummel me with rain the size of frying pans
I float thru the rooms here and
throw a few books around,
creak the floors
break some dishes and
get you cold
and shaky chilled
sorry
knock me flat, the gun to the head, the shock of light
end this occupation, this permanent vacation
the kind of poltergeist
can't wait for the sun



posted at 12:05 PM