1.

The paws at the rump of my skull
are too many.

I’d be like a gold camel, who takes only sips
at the water, and seldom.

2.

Here, there’s a birdhouse across the pulled water,
behind the felled tree

that dipped in a windstorm
that howled like an eagle.
Gold eagle.

3.

Napoleon sits, wears his laurels. He rots
in Vermont, in a stoop or a hamlet.

He’s mushed like the leaves
resting under the birdhouse.

The leaves resting under gold water.

4.

I say, “Would you screech, blind canary, or fluff
like the gadflies I’ve seen all my life?

I haven’t the lip or the pelt for it, no,
I haven’t the hollow, prone, legible bones.”

Americans eat a lot of mouth cement.

I would like to get a job where I’m paid to stare at a thumbtack instead of a computer.

Should I create a new email account and then enroll that email account in community college so I can accrue more student loans?

When I was fifteen I ran away from home because if poems were fish then they would have long hair.

Do you remember the last time someone caught you eating a pile of freshly raked leaves?

I don’t know what happened to this country’s meat consumption, but I think it moved somewhere and built a wall.

One of my favorite things to do is rub a banana peel on a penny until it rusts.

The summer after my brain fell apart, the town flooded, but no one blamed me I didn’t have a boat.

I heard an interview on the radio recently. I’m not sure who was being interviewed.

If the inside of your shoe becomes discolored caress it with egg whites and milk.

hard animals

On a map, the world is unrecognizable / in a staircase, it becomes cyclical / a rounded jail, a tall bird cage / our every step a bite, a tooth / piano key / hard enamel / hard animal / we gnaw bones / whittle coarse edge into point / carnivores that chew chew chew / tonguing our deep exasperation / and softly, spit it out again / this pulp / this chewing tobacco / our spit filters the earth / our spit a bitter tonic like salt in the wounds of monsters.

dissonance

i. My head a split tire / thick bolt wrench limbs / my bones a tire iron / static and rust, the infiltration of oxygen / you smile and the heat waves falter / shatter in little droplets / against the palm of your hands.

ii. My head a pit fire, a storming wind / thin oxygen thin sky / the smell of a rainfall / interrupted.

iii. This mundane spilling out / we are made inanimate, we are / walking through the motions, wading in fog / tearing into lightlessness like / ripped meat / from the bone.

iv. Running gets us nowhere / I am still here blistering sympathies, insufficiencies / silences stretching their bone hands / round necks, caught on lockets / like lifelines; they call the names of your ghosts.

august looks like winter this year
my drug dealer asked me on a date to go ice skating
i google insomnia and delirium
i look for another doorway in the bathtub n in my bed
it doesn’t matter that we’re gonna die
i feel like im dying often anyway
what’s it like to breathe heavily
across a snowy ocean
an android greets a life sentence

if you pump my stomach
itll just be pink gooey stuff
youll say to the doctor
whats all this? what is that?
the doctor will say
oh..my gosh!
it appears as if shes in love!
or, was in love
the gooey pink stuff clogged up her lungs
and she died
from being in love
we can revive her if we take it all out
you and the doctor take tiny shovels
and start scooping the goo out of my body
i cough a little and come back awake
hey guys!
im back!
the next thing you know,
youre inviting me to your house again
and i bring my ukulele
and by 11pm that night
during our soggy and cold sleepover
im being rushed to the hospital again