He is shamelessly happy
to take out the trash.
He descends the spiral staircase
and follows the stone path
laid out to the can.
Well, no longer a can-
more like giant Tupperware
with wheels. Late October,
winter on the way.

He has a smoke in the alley.
The neighborhood is dying-
everyone is moving closer
to downtown, closer
to the ache of the city.
He doesn't mind-
popularity is unusable.

This row of Victorians
used to be elegant, similar
to the photograph of an actress
long dead, or almost there.
Only a matter of time before
the block is bought up
and leveled for something
monstrous and profitable.

We must be brave when everything
is taken away. He exhales
and looks up to where
the moon should be, but is not.
His beard is more white
than gray, his eyes
more closed than open.

Wigilia Dinners

A muddy patch on Greyhound windows,
scraping clean in claret bath lacquer
mulling heat rash ruddy amongst
the stomach pain swirls inky acidic
markers as testament to what gets
left as unburned kindle, as untested steel,
as chalkboard theory, as textbook framework.

Embrace of asphalt arms, the model
sparkling monuments to welfare states past
which guide as gilded wire to weary dawns
forward in militia march of white faced
hours, leaking pavement shades in buckets
for trenchant timing up is the strongest
suit of cardstock to have handed.

Plastic cups, plates of precious silver,
like a mismatch of Wigilia and milk bar,
wash against each as sandshore rocks
the barring remove of aparting ocean;
as still as life mural painting, stand
up personable, but it's not the
sort of supper you have until you're

older, able to make sense.

Ode to DLR

You and I should meet on air,
in these whirling hyperloop palaces
of all burnished steel, treated glass,
Polish plumbers' expressions of effort
possessed of a breaking cold becoming
strangely humble,

as if you could meet anyone,
from anywhere,
when next break light chimes.

You and I should make an affair,
bathe in serendipitous twinkle of
Alexandra Palace hill light,
click heels and wish to tune
of Turkish butchers' instrumental clatter,
seeming soundtrack of Haringey

as if there could be anything,
all desires,
in off-beat pulse of gig space walls,

in the grandeur spiral of 8 million
we sometimes find ourselves.

as two points alighting the same.

in the house behind me a gun was fired
and everyone mistook it for a firework-

for a vessel, reckless and ephemeral 
pyrotechnics and bodies...
one and the same, i guess.

the point is he died,
while I looked at the Internet
and masturbated in my bed.

many deaths have occurred
while i've masturbated in my bed.

this reality and the eeriness
of the Starbucks mermaid,

are more grounding than a funeral.

ONE

when i was nineteen, or eighteen or twenty, my friends and i went to this party. some party in some strange basement-in-an-alley type place. the type of place we loved, where we felt like we were somewhere doing something. there was a show, some terrible band was playing terrible music. i will never remember who. that isn't important to this story though.

we all got idiotically drunk. the kind of drunk you look back on and wonder how you could ever act so free.

so idiotically drunk we took off our shirts. all of us. so drunk and dancing. so free so loud so uncaring. i had brought one of those idiotically large bottles of wine. you know the kind, the ones that look like regular wine bottles but magnified. i thought i was tough and dramatic. maybe free. anyway, no shirts, drunk, dancing. a friend i wanted to fuck took my idiot bottle of wine and took a idiotically large drink of it. he was an alcoholic. that isn't important to this story though. we kept dancing and he kept drinking. somehow my mouth violently collided with the bottom of the bottle. not purposely, mind you. very fucking accidentally. i remember it not being my fault and i'm sure he remembers it not being his. anyway, it hurt. alot. i knew i wasn't going to like what happened when i ran my tongue across my teeth. and i didn’t. a significant chunk of one of my front teeth was gone. did i swallow it? was it on the ground? i remember my third or fourth thought immediately after it happened was to wonder if someone was going to find it on the sticky floor the next day.

a few weeks or perhaps a month or so later my mom came to pick me up to go to her house for something, maybe for a holiday. maybe it was autumn then. i don’t remember. i remember walking out of my apartment and through the garden. filled with dread. i walked to her car and said “Hi mom” and i've always heard of people say how they 'could never forget the look on his/her/their face' but i'd never really believed it. my memory always has been spotty. but i remember that look. the look on her face when i opened my mouth and she saw my tooth. i don't think she looked at me again the entire time she was driving us home.

my parents paid to have it fixed. no daughter of theirs was going to walk around looking like that. i went to the dentist i'd been seeing since i was a child. she asked me how my mother was, how my brother was liking college. she even remembered what college he was going to. he has always been a patient of hers as well. my whole family had been. she asked me how it had happened. i tried to make it sound casual “Well my friend accidentally hit me in the face with a giant bottle of wine ha ha.” it did not come off casual or ha ha. i don't think she talked the entire time she was making my teeth symmetrical again.

this happened four, or five or three, years ago. my teeth still look symmetrical and you can't tell one is half fake unless you examine them closely. i forget it ever happened most of the time. the only times i remember is on first dates when i use it as a conversation piece, or when i want to eat an apple. i'm scared that if i bite into an apple my fake tooth bit will pop right off.

TWO

for three weeks straight i would wake up from dreams of my teeth crumbling in my mouth. the dreams would begin in a medley of scenarios, they never seemed specific enough to be worth remembering. then it would be the same, every time. i would run my tongue across my teeth and they wouldn't hold still, they would wiggle and feel frightening. i would then look in a mirror and bare my teeth to myself they would be unhappy shades of brown. sickly ambers and the muds of three-days-ago rains. horrified i would reach up to touch them. my fingers would meet bone and the teeth would just crumble crumble crumble at the slightest touch it looked like a roman ruin panic would overtake me as my mouth turned into the grounds of the parthenon.

when i wake i feel my teeth one by one, touching each as counting my eggs in my nest. not being able to avoid feeling as if athena was disappointed in me.

THREE

googling the family tree of zeus on a saturday night to find what goddess i could pretend to be that week. it hurt my head to read all the names and murders of such a tortured family.

who's to tell

don't concern yourself w/ why i fall
silent in the dime store dressing room

i'm simply considering what the cops
could tell about me from my corpse alone:

twenty-something / female / nailbiter
a ham in the bedroom (groomed pubic hair)

poor circulation / chronic disease / purple knees
eats amitriptyline, cyclobenzaprine, daily b.c.

forever not ready for... next of kin? forget it
just a long procession of indiscretions

one after another, who's to tell whether
she fell in love too easily or not at all?

subliminal scars traverse wrists, shins
chief inspector thinks stigmata, then chokes

back his unchewed dogmatism, spewing out
baptismal-like onto the parking lot, rinsing away

all forensic evidence of foul play or wtf
i was last seen trying to say, choke me

only long enough to make the ceiling blur
to make the mad forget their self-inflicted

sores, deep inside the drawstring pockets
of the body left to rot outside your door

fucked up firsts

out of my whole palaceful of taxidermied teenage boys
you’re my favorite, pissing eternally on the rubber moon
perhaps we never rly landed on the perfect NASA snap-
shot of the kennedy assassin i'm down here wearing as a hat
as if it's just another tourist trap inside my dirty film debut
there's no one actually inside me but a b&w tequila worm
they green-screen the erection in later, pin the tail on the 
imaginary friend, play pretend we were each other’s fucked
up firsts, redeeming the worst virgin daze of our lives
thinking sex on the beach wouldn't hammer sand straight
through my hourglass physique- yes, i see this year
it's chic to misremember, tremor, have too much to drink
but in the long run who will recreate, cosplay the deadbeat 
dungeon master w/ his feet up on the back of daddy's seat?

alphabentitus

psycho junkyard varmints got me magically bat-shit bankrupt by meat-juice o'clock
like fuck there's nothing left but our asbestos back porch & fat guest room cigars
on & on          oh no she didn't         roll credits for jesus         rape a rainbow in its sleep
I'm verifying my own virginity w/ a magnifying glass until the sun starts to burn through
I been thank-you-much baptized in ape shit & jungle funk since the day I was first misconstrued
I still feel it running out the raging parties of my undies: reefer dens          mushroom hells         lazy
underage keg stand's embarrassing back bend of death          why don't we maypole this day trip
into pagan outer space? like some unstudied workweek rerun of my favorite sci-fi show on blow
I'm not changing my street name this late in the game          not taking any rides downtown
just to powder my ashes over the village oil can          or snub the upchuck cuties on the corner
for asking why my robot buttons glow no longer          short answer: my ALPHABENTITUS
JUST DON'T GO THERE tear my clumsy stunt double          a new uptick esophagus
suck the noxious tusk melt from my slutty mirror skirt          at mid-dock I should have said it
sure as my former den mother is now an orthodontist          sure as shit is getting out of hand