elfin temptress with the doe queen’s eyes,

you disarm me.  i seethe to know your form

underneath me

as i gaze upon your picture’s moody tone.  

you remind me of everything

i’ve ever wanted to see pout.  

symmetry’s muse.  

perfection’s attainability.  

the very model

of that very first rib.  and i’d love to scrape my teeth over that bone.

i met staphanie in a hanoi brothel four years after i killed my last gook.  she lacked a sense of humor, but always made me laugh.  if i told you about her madame or the punchy little pimp of a yellow monkey who liked to blacken the eyes of his sisters, i’d need to preface it with a glass of scotch to dim the memory of the way i cut him open, taint to tits, and fed his balls into her cunt right before i put the match to her gasoline soaked skirt.  it still makes my brain squirm.  my fault, i suppose.  uncle sam pointed at me and i raised my hand.  back when i had one.  grenades and quaaludes and shit.  the shit.  that was the worst of it.  the jungle has a way of fouling the funk of foulness evermore.  that is, when it’s not snapping bullet sonnets past your ears. the bullets merely verses, spat by mystery authors fucking with your love of words.  take a minute and think about the last time you drank a cold one on a scorcher of a saturday afternoon.  now, imagine a 6 pound sledge slapping right between your shoulder blades as a butterfly steals an eskimo kiss from your sunburned beak.  that’s your sense of purpose in the service.  now, grab your rifle, son.  you don’t want to be left out when the fireworks twilight the black night.  your bayonet’s sole use in a fight against native ghosts is to dig the bugs out of your thighs.  make sure they don’t lay their eggs in there.  so many scars.  stephanie never cared.  she relished my hot dog attitude and loved to wear nothing but my shiny dog tags.  her gaptoothed smile and jade eyes.  good god almighty.  where has she gone?  and why is her blood all over me?

the city in the rain is a hushed turtle shelled by an amalgamation of low flying clouds.  the puddled walkways make curious its ambulators, sidestepping and tiptoeing to avoid an uncomfortable afternoon of squishy socks.  umbrellas shield the old and the arthritic, cautious not make any sudden movements lest they slip on the cobbled streets.  smokers huddle under the cafe awnings and laugh with humid breath into their cellphones.  the trees sag to pat me on the head with wet leaves as i pass under their boughs; a true pagan baptism that enlivens my faith in the natural world every time.  

i jog and jog, my skin sopped and pruned from sweat and raindrops.  the soaked air fills my straining lungs over and over and over as my pace quickens and i’m damn near a full-on sprint, heading straight for the harbor.  i’d leap right in if i had any sense about me.  then i’d swim until my muscles fired pure bile and gave out.  and then i’d float to wherever the moon told the current to take me.  hoping for oysters in nova scotia.

i stop at the end of the boardwalk rail and i’m entranced.  the pattering drops sizzle the water’s surface and my gaze becomes more severe.  my mind realizes like anything else on this planet that the ocean will never be full until it dies.  it will rain and pour and the levies will crumble and and that jazz the rock n rollers told us about will come true and the skyscrapers will become architectural icebergs scraping the depths of the shorelines like a downtown kelp farm.  it’s not so bad, i tell myself.  albuquerque has been missing a coastline all along…

‘you look like a drowning fish and i sometimes want to kill you.’  the last words she remembers from a dream that woke her.  the words were spoken by you.  your character, her dreamy you, swims through her murky unconscious like a crocodile.  you’re her sleeping nemesis.  she tells you all about it.  the dream.  she tells you about your evil plots and your vicious words.  you listen to her fears about you and you measure your own about her.  you are new to each other and you are newer, still, to the city.  she continues to confess your hidden sins.  how you ate her fingers.  how you ripped her hair from her scalp, in bloody chunks, with your bare hands.   how your breath stung her eyes and how you laughed at her screams.  all while your cock grew freakishly large inside of her, ripping through her vaginal wall and lancing through her intestines, spiking into her esophagus to choke her with a throat tickle.  she tells you this in grave tones as she pulls the chewy, tear-soaked sleep crust from her swollen eyes.  she doesn’t know what to make of you.  you stare deep into her eyes with an unflinching focus of accomplishment.  you don’t let her see your excitement, but you know what her mind has told her in code.  you are free to have your way with her.  you’ve raped her nightmare and she wants you to know it.  your eyes are locked and your brain is buzzing a chorus of bee stings into every hair follicle you have.  she looks like she’s scared.  she looks like she wants to run.  so you break the sunrise silence and dare her to.

briae asked: you must answer now; what is your favourite thing about yourself?

my immaturity.  (i farted as i wrote that…)

making out under the pine trees with his best friend’s sister, he lamented the sun’s inability to penetrate the needles, but quickly reversed his logic afraid that the illumination of their skin would chase away their shared goosebumps, which bloomed a diced second after their lips first touched and aroused in them the confirmation that the lingering looks and drunk hugs of christmases past were simply the precursor to a long awaited tongue & lip war in full view of nobody but the backwoods birds and the brook they drank from when they ran out of beer and the sun came up and it was time to explain to the breakfast waitress why they smelled of fire and dirt and brown booze as they giggled their way through poached eggs and larded bacon, delirious and inconsistent in the care with which they took towards the other diners in the diner, he reached below the counter top and put his hand high upon her thigh and whispered into her ear that he had every intention of dreaming about her after he walked her back to her mum’s and snuck back into his own house safely avoiding another lecture on the “importance” of not breaking curfew…

sucking in the dusty air, out of breath, he coughs a laugh to the open road content to be losing his mind on the border of easy street and win some/lose some.  it’s decision time and he’s too thirsty to think it through.  his eyes shine like beets’ blood, but they do not bleed. he does not sweat.  he cannot spit.  he’s a raisin man about to be taken to task by the eastern sun, way out west where the desert meets the mountain’s foothills.   his skin will snap, for sure, this day.   if the clouds can’t win, how can he?  his fingernails have grown curly like tumbleweeds he’s never seen, not even here.  they couldn’t tumble anyhow.  the air doesn’t move it just sits there like a granite monument to cracked earth.  a one man prison barred by laughing cactus obelisks and a scorpion tailed loss of purpose.  

he comes upon the road after a long time not trying to die.  to his left it stretches arrow straight into the heat’s blur.  to the right it does the same.  he pendulums his head back and forth trying to cipher his future in each lonely direction.  his mouth hangs ajar, his nose packed with silica, blistered lips stuck to his dirt caked teeth.  his brain remembers what the road has in store.  take the left and it’s a wife and kids and a time share and coupon fliers and major league baseball hats.  take the right and it’s off to jail having never had a hot dog on the boardwalk.  what to do?  he picks his face up to the sky like kids do when they drink the rain, but his face does not get wet.  his chin falls back to his chest and he sighs a dusty sigh and begins his vertical shuffle across the horizontal asphalt toward all the smiling mermaids.

it’s a stone fruit, this avocado life.  eat ‘em up, those juicy sweet bits that surround the dead hard pits, which merely need to be buried to flourish with life again, anew in beauty.  plumb the plums down to their centers with fingers and teeth and tongues and spit the rock jewel into the big pile by your bedside before you indulge in yet another.  grease your lips with the virgin olive’s oil and you’ll know the taste of godliness.  split a peach, if only to rub both your cheeks fuzzy, as the nectar drips from your hands onto the grass.  eat ‘em up, those juicy sweet bits.  and never forget the cherry on top.   

a quartered fig from topview reminds me so much of peering into you and knowing why you ache and writhe naked of meaningful thought, like a railed caterpillar, gravity stricken on a downhill track tobogganing toward the lost war of conversation art and into the greasy light of laptop effulgence; a pixelated mirror trick to deign the most principal part of your attractiveness into being a sham of wanton desire when the truth is i’ve been noshing all day long, insatiable, and growing more and more nervous the habit will take hold and bring about calamity on my swinging hammer i too readily employ as a self-defense mechanism only to be taunted by your mechanized competitor, which has diminished  natural abilities and made moot the act of even trying to validate myself as alive and eager to remake the static cling of sweaty bits and smiles.  so i’ll take a break and go outside and maybe let the sunlight charge my spirits so as to confront the dying melody that is running out of love for you.

there are groupies already out there waiting to love your band that doesn’t even exist yet.