One day I came across an inverted map of the Western Hemisphere. Cape Horn was in Alaska's usual position. I felt very disturbed, like air was flooding into the space above North America and

love becoming, like an apple,
this requires time, starred
blossom, then summer, the attention
of bees, grown men
bow their heads, concentrating
on the national anthem
in stadiums

You've told me you feel like a bat.

What you don't mean is your wings.
Or the development of a reflex that draws your ears toward small sounds.

What you do mean is that you're

brick

once in 2011

someone at a party

offered me rum

mixed with cough medicine

from a 1 liter plastic bottle of generic orange soda

i thought

this will make

The computers will run an error the size of oceans howling crazy for the pale moon & will hurtle through our bodies to get there. My brother says the lights across the river will burn out. 

[practice breathing, talk to snakes, how to suck venom from a wound]

     -february 3, 2012: “I’m getting better at branching out”

Whose hometown are we in in the dream? :: Do you hold my hand or do you disembowel me? Whose side are you on, anyway? :: My confession on this Sunday morning is: we are all human.

I’ve seen men punch holes in walls. They lead nowhere – I’ve looked, I tried to escape. I’ve seen what happens afterward too.

another kind of crime scene
walking to the post office with A

Let’s go back to the twin indigo suns/ in our eyes. To shooting holes/ through the walls of our skin, one/ metal kiss at a time...

When a strawberry’s
sore, it leaks

New ballparks keep sprouting up,
like summer sweet corn. 

Come closer reader, please,
I didn’t mean to insult you. 
I’ll let you punch me
right in my asking face.

The full moon may strike you
dumb and limp and lost
when bat readies to encounter ball
and you hit it high as the moon--
still the ump declares, You’re out!
before you’ve moved a step from home. 

There’s no TV or radio here, so it’s only later we hear that our guys lost big
at home on Blake Street

I would go back now, though, live in the nervous fidget
before I said I like you & kissed her braces
with my upper lip & bled all over her teeth.

There is something about listening
To a baseball game on the radio

each pitch lost in the peripheral blink of an eye

If I leave rambling, incoherent apologies on your voicemail at four in the morning, is it still impressive that I’ve quit drinking?

I awoke in a forest of yellow
trees. When the air turned cold
they erased themselves.

I’m hoarse and feverish. We sing in the streets, “Feelin’ good was good enough for me, hee hee,” but then the breakfast booth only has two seats.

I wear a velvet piece to the therapist’s office and she asks me to close my eyes. We agree to experience an illusion of me dancing...

I do not leave
the houses I’ve built, I carry the nails and raise

the walls around me

I can’t stop watching teenage boys eat shit at the skate park.
It gives me real pleasure.