Stuck at 21

I wound up sitting at a table with Jay
and a bunch of his friends and their
stressful conversation, and I was
smoking pot, like out of a nervous habit,
not in a joint or pipe or anything, in my
dream it was just a long stalk, like a
green wheat-head, and I was
alternately lighting it and smoking it and
dipping it in a glass of water provided for the
purpose so it wouldn’t burn too fast and
just doing that over and over unconsciously
‘cause I was so stressed to have him there
plus also his gender kept blurring just a
little bit and that confused me and
then suddenly I sort of noticed what I
was doing and looked at the glass of
scummy water with seeds floating in it and
sort of threw the stalk down and walked
off in disgust and oh everyone had this
sick cartoon sort of quality to them
and androgynous or blurred gender but in a
really fucked up way, like one person
looking like a 70’s cartoon version of a
beat with long purple hair and eyes
glazed with passion and drugs, slightly rounded chest
and 5:00 shadow on their face of purplish
stubble and freaky itty thighs, like
literally you could wrap a hand
around one – wrist sized and totally
unproportionate and
everything was cast in this weird lighting of
yellows and greens and half the people
there were meant to be dead—

They Got In

06.11.97
01.04.04

[ ]

I was in a college or dorms or
institution of some kind and we’d each been
given a key to unlock something special.
I think mine went to a fishing
boat and someone else had the key to
church and another person held the
key to the computers but this one
kid went around talking and conniving
and sneaking the keys from us one by
one until he had them all and I
was the first to give him mine
and I could have joined him except
I realized how evil he was and
the rest of us locked ourselves in the
institution main building and they
were all vampire clustered outside
howling grinning and I guess after
awhile they got in.

Foster-words

This poem was conceived in the bad-dream breadline by a woman looking to trade five wooden rosary beads and a Vernors bottle-cap for agave saltines.
This poem spent its first 15 years in a silver-chrome playpen eating stale popcorn from pre-school days.
This poem smells like lanolin and goat’s milk and vulcanized welcome mats.
This poem has 18 fingers, a hyena clit, and a universal bi-hooked tail with full ionizing capabilities and no mass.
This poem wants to monkey-arm your neck and suck your nose—
This poem wants its name stuck in your throat.

Fever-fed

on opiates, cigarettes
and macaroni cheese.
Cinder-tongued,
sleep-steeping in sheet sweat
swollen dreams—
your son is always calling my name.

Blister-lipped I
am hearing myself moving
for your arms
why does my pillow
like your girlfriend’s mouth?

Un language-locked,
in visions I am you
I dreamt
I dreamt
you came back to watch me cry.

Travelogue

A naked girl with a rosemary wreath scratching her temples handed me an 8-oz Coke bottle filled with shells and indicated I should turn it to salt. The gumball machines are full of parasites—all the chocolate bars are wrapped in rust. Roads are paved in (unsalted) peanuts, the shells leave delicate splinters between my bare toes. My swimming pool is full of pedialyte. The tips of my nails are silver-edged and the girl is standing silent, scratching a mosquito bite on the back of her ankle. I’ve forgotten how to turn the shells to salt. And then she wrinkles her nose pointedly and turns her head, twigs scraping her cheek—there is blood on the inseam of my thighs. Squatting over a large conch shell I practice my Kegel’s with the unhurried desperation common to dreams. The shell fills—sand turns brown around me—there is too much blood. The shell is in the girl’s hands now, she holds it out carefully. I am still bleeding. I smell a body behind me before I see it – someone slaps my back, hard and the bleeding stops like hiccups. Someone curls me thoughtfully on the sand, tucking my knees beneath my chin and whispers I should lie quietly here until I wake.

I'm Not Scared

08.28.00
12.19.03

[ ]

I woke up Sunday to the sound of quick breathing
and rocks being thrown. The house was so full of light all
the clocks had shorted out and I ran outside to see
what time it was, which was unfortunate.
I woke up Sunday after a night of dreaming
about lovers I never knew; short-haired, lust-
ravaged girls each of whom was a unique
combination of Arabian Nights and Playboy
centerfold. Each of them dies in some equally
unforeseen and tragic way. The last was eaten
alive by ants as she lay immobile in fevered dream.
I fondled the desiccated curves of clavicle
and jaw and remembered what a teacher had said, that
everyone I dream of is another part of me, and
tried and tried to cry for this beautiful girl I’d
lost.
I woke up Sunday morning and began gathering
kindling to burn the house. I threw all my books
in a huge pile in the middle of the hall
and ranged cats and computers counterclockwise around
it.
I woke up Sunday with a mouth full of powder
that tasted like pixie sticks and speed and the
lingering smell of an empty glass vial of citrus
aftershave.
I woke up Sunday morning with my legs
bent beneath me, wondering what a girls has to do in
this day and age to get another girl to fuck
her up the ass and if my luck would change if
I trimmed my nails.
I woke up Sunday morning remembering Matt’s mouth
on my clit and wondering if blowjobs felt this good and
why didn’t they teach more straight boys how to
do things like this in school instead of all the
esoterics of woodshop and metal files.
I woke up Sunday dreaming that I knelt on a
thinly carpeted floor with my master’s collar still
safe around my throat and all the fear and pain
of losing it had been nothing but a moment’s
bad dream.
I awoke Sunday to discover my naked arms
pulled above my head and joined, wrists pinned,
to the mattress in a butterfly crucifixion, which
didn’t hurt nearly as much as one might expect,
the pin being steel and mainly thrust through
bone, but there was no one on the ceiling or
peering unabashed through the window to observe my
potential struggles or escape and I found that a
little disappointing.
I awoke Sunday to find a genii hovering conservatively
positioned above my bed, who informed me that as per
the new world order, yhe had been directed to
tattoo a single expression on my face as my
constant shifting through facial gestures was rapidly
sapping the world’s supply of surplus energy, and
I lay silent trying to decide how I wanted to
look for all time thereafter, and should it be
sexy or silly or curious, should I choose what
would best express me or be most appealing and the
genie grew tired of my thoughtful procrastination and
offered to dye my eyes any color of my choosing
provided I decided in the next 7 seconds and
steal all my sleep for the next hundred years if I
didn’t.

Lot's Wife

02.08.01
11.23.03

Sardines in oil that crunch between my mother’s teeth. Ragged red strips of lox on a freezer-burned bagel. I piss long strings of pearls for two hours straight—the toilet bowl overflowed and the floor grew wet and slippery with toilet paper rags and broken beads. Someone banged on my stall all during recess but “I like the angry birdhouse”
A naked girl with a rosemary wreath scratching her temples handed me an 8-oz Coke bottle filled with shells and indicated I should turn it to salt. The gumball machines are full of parasites—all the chocolate bars are wrapped in rust. Roads are paved in (unsalted) peanuts, the shells leave delicate splinters between my bare toes. My swimming pool is full of pedialyte. The tips of my nails are silver-edged and the girl is standing silent, scratching a mosquito bite on the back of her ankle. I’ve forgotten how to turn the shells to salt. And then she wrinkles her nose pointedly and turns her head, twigs scraping her cheek—there is blood on the inseam of my thighs. Squatting over a large conch shell I practice my Kegel’s with the unhurried desperation common to dreams. The shell fills—sand turns brown around me—there is too much blood. The shell is in the girl’s hands now, she holds it out carefully. I am still bleeding. I smell a body behind me before I see it – someone slaps my back, hard and the bleeding stops like hiccups. Someone curls me thoughtfully on the sand, tucking my knees beneath my chin and whispers I should lie quietly here until I wake.

Hydrophobia

I woke up from terrible dreams – bugs that flew biting all over my body, Topher a monster with rabies, and me running with dreamy desperateness with three boys whose faces I never saw. We made it to an apartment – the kitchen was slimy-damp and full of ants and we found a passage to go through and at the bottom found piles of photos and pictures and all sorts of paintings, all showing a gaunt-faced man with blue daubed on his cheeks and a blue blindfold over his eyes dying or dead. And we found bodies. And the dream began with Tim waking in my bed and talking about a dream he had about Mrs. Graelyn, so when I woke up I was terribly confused about what I had and had not dreamed. And Tim pulled me against him and held and kissed me, listened while I told him what happened and assured me it was just a dream. It’s okay, he told me, I’m really Timpachu, Topher is just Topher, it was a bad dream but you’re awake now. I love him. And I don’t write nearly enough—like I’m not miserable now so what’s the point? Misery lends everything eloquence.

Sacrifice Two Pigeons

Old gum sticks to my notebook in waxy globs, I time the flow of Xanax through my blood. Last night I dreamt something I promised to remember.
“The speaker wants to know if they do have a relationship.”

After the Bloody Chamber

I dream of halls of women. Women bound and women kissing, screaming, slapping, laughing and laughing and killing. I dream in the best Playboy style of joining a convent of irreverently lesbian nuns, of stern Mother Superiors, of long-haired Catholic school-girls with the innocently exotic eyes of French baby-dolls. Of split pussies, of plump clitori. A fantasy madhouse of sex mirrored on sex. A tropicality of humid sensuousness. Bluebeard's castle when the dread pirate is found to be a woman in drag, the dungeons well-equipped with leather toys. Cinderella at the ball as the clock strikes midnight and the prince's bound breasts bob up against her martial-striped jacket, just before she kneels down to set her lips against Cinderella's sparkling glass slippers. Where does it all come from; this Gothic vagrancy of sex? Where do I find it?