how are you

the voice is as it always was
heavy like granite
but warm like burbon at christmas.
the hello is unsure, like boys are
with sweaty palms and over licked lips
at a school dance
the insides of their pockets rubbed raw.
there is a laugh uncorked that shocks me,
stirs in me over waves of radio active wasted minuets
when we're not in coversations but should be.
perhaps becuse we never made plans
just made time like pre packaged meals single girls
nuke for themselves with unmade faces.
it reminds of her superglue smile
the revolver of her wit
point blank - it's like i'm looking in a rain soaked window
watching her left foot tap as she sits
some hundred miles from my dry patch of kitchen.
our telephones propped between ear and shoulder
and in between our words
you can hear i loved you i loved you i loved you.



...

clean up strategicly

wires wires everywhere
but those can't go just yet. to untangle the masses of black on black and pale once white electrodes takes a patience much more suited for quite work - takes nimble and flexible falanges that manuever like a dancer.

first will be the gripping and crippling of the clothing. which as peices spray lovlingly just as themselves - a bra, one sock, a sweatshirt. but they have amassed formed possies and gangs, even clicks. the hugest most menacing pile of rough blacks and grays, filled with scared holey tights have scattered far away from the summer shorts and tank tops. and the sheets are enveloping what is left of color squad, though their different colors clash and none of them are truly friends, i find them, the loners, in crazy places, like the crack between the door and the dark spot in my closedt where no shoes can fit. there are less dishes than i expected. they will be easy to move but clear no space.

it's the paper. the data base of my life. six long months out of school into 'free'lance that i have payed for dearly. a spilled bottle of pills, just asprin that in moments of disarray i've prayed were sleeping pills - i've almost gobbled them up - but they are still there, white dots like pins on map, their only goal to OD the vaccum, their henchmen, who will mosey in soon.

it must be a clear and conscise battle - there will be a timeline to this. a battle plan. i have to get myself in order. my parents have shoved me into this box from a house, to this life from my teens in my twenties. and the only way 2 escape is to make it my own. make it so clean, it's just like mother theresa's casket: inspectable, quiet, clear and dead.



....

our ogum

the city paints over the pillars on the 1&9 underpass
at least 3 times a year.
this slate gray laquor much more the vandal,
like the second wing attached to tut's tomb
which hid history for hundres of years until the x-rays saw benieth
or the sand blasted rhinoplasty of the sphinx.

it is an off key, one two punch, pulvarizing
our statement of purpose, our ownership of this stomach of a city,
a tattoo our mother hates.

why punnish those who risk limb, jail,
or black eyes and kidney shots for tagging off their own turf?
to scribble our names on the walls of our coffins; to say we were here
it is part of us, pulsing in our DNA, dipping out of our snot noses, drumming to the beat from our ipods.



....

the trouble with being right

is that often you are right but also alone
abset of companions to celebreate your rightness