In Cars

talking about death under yellow lights
we said we hoped not to die in cars
because where we were going
you could only get to
by going too fast
surrounded by metal that twists like irony
and bores through our skulls,
burning your blonde hair brown
and shattering my glasses into fragments
that could stick out of my spine
so that when you look into my bones
all you'd see would be yourself
reflected in a million slivers,
the way I see you

New Violence

the great brood

There's a brood of bees in the shed, recollecting an old humming song,

a complete buzzing, a deficit I need to rectify,

as though there has ever been any durability to my moral positions

dying poems

today relied on artlessness
and not even putrid hospital poetics can drill through this structure that was once soft like the feeling of home, warm sheets and loving wake-up calls.

today relied on artlessness
and I hate hospitals because I am nothing like the wire fissioned into these bones
nor the lungs so full of what the heart could not pump
and they can not help us if we are already drenched with what we tried to inspire
and they've never held anything in place

today relied on how much i hate hospitals
the cleaving to death, the distrust in the artistic
I could read all our dying poems by the fuck ups of materials that spilled onto the floor
hospital blankets, cheap jewelry, saliva,smashed fingers, all that you've been fighting tokeep inside of you, spat back out onto your chest
and i hate hospitals because even sedatives did not allow for the abandonment of emotional arrest,

but maybe that's just artlessness
and it's all we can allow for
until we just overflow onto our fur and seep lymph from these fragile bones and valves worn so thin from years of scratching at doors
hoping someone will release us from ourselves

and although artlessness has not yet found me relief
i hope you found yours,
goodnight my little sweet.

Hey Paula!

Whalebone

Exhausted in any number of ways
you heave yourself into the street
to walk off the fear of falling into it again
and to put light in your lanthanum bones
once again projecting against the moon
words like "I'm not sorry, but at the same time
I so am." or even just "Living is frightening."
Because living is frightening
and I'm not sorry, but I so am
and my lanthanum bones form a projector
and your copper wires form the moon.