New Jersey feels a lot bigger than it looks

There are miles and miles of road.
Little towns are marked only by trees
like arboreal sovereignty.
Like tiny nations inside of our garden empire,
amassed of only counties of countries.

Each song on my radio is a national anthem.
I rule the soundtrack to this
statewide continent
at the wheel of this mobile embassy,
connecting alien dynasties
in the vehicle dragging me
further from and closer to home.

There is no sea between us.
We both rest on the same shores,
but an ocean can scream for decades
stretching the space
from today to tomorrow.

Maps were once the paper lifeboats along the Atlantic
but in this modern age,
these globally positioned sherpas
fizzle in the conductive salty brine
seasoned with the sobbing testimonies
of travelers too afraid to swim alone.

So, we stick to land
lined with trees that birthed those obsolete sailboats,
following the paths dug out
by the claws of our dead sea.
The tectonic teeth of yawning miles
gnash at my landlocked toes
that no longer dance across our microcosmic continent
like they used to.
They eviscerate the tiny bodies
in my outstretched fingers
that strain to bridge the endless distance
between none
and one.

The earthquakes of Pangea's grinding jaw
shake my ballerina bones
and halt my continental convoy,
destroying my ambassadorial machine
and leaving it hungry and wanting.
This fault line keeps us further apart
than an ocean or a forest ever could.
My chewed up toes could never cross this gaping maw--

But if you called me beautiful
and called me home,
I swear I could leap across this chasm
and find asylum in you.

tetrodotoxin

See, last night, I had this dream
where I was dead.
I tried to wake up,
but resurrection is so difficult sometimes,
and I guess I must have
missed a step.

I stumbled around my room
like a zombie in Haiti
and absently wondered
if I'd been eating any pufferfish lately.

I wondered where the rest of me had gone.

I wondered if this dusty mound of benzos
would be a better choice
to right this lopsided detachment,
but resurrection is so difficult sometimes,
and I already messed that up once.

I am drowning
like my skin doesn't fit
my emptied insides
anymore.

I am drowning
like when an emptied house
becomes a cavern.

I am drowning
because I am living off of
liquid and smoke
and mirrors,
proving nothing but the physicality
of this surreality.

This pastel pile of pills in my palm
are not
not
not an attempt on my life
so much as an attempt
to balance this newfound
lazarus syndrome,
because resurrection is so difficult sometimes,
and I'm getting bored
of these rotting brains
in this thriving flesh.

The unlife of the undead
is not so exciting on a movie screen or
through glasses lens
as Hollywood might lead you to believe.

It's just hours and days and weeks of
wishing
you had never
eaten
that
blowfish.

Wishing and watching
and trying to figure out some clever way
to turn off the TV or
at least change the channel,
or maybe a way to smash in the screen
and burst the autobiographical cathode tube
because resurrection is so difficult sometimes,
and it would be far simpler
to leave things where they belong.

I absently wondered how many creeping hours were left
before my next somnambulent commercial break,
but sleep never comes easy
when you join the ranks of the undead.

Maybe it's because
resurrection is so difficult sometimes,
and any day now,
I'll have this dream
where I'm alive,
where that vodun sorceror feeds me salt,
reestablishes my
suspended animation
and I won't miss a step this time.

There is a cliche which says

There is a cliche which says
"I wear my heart on my sleeve,"
and every time I hear it,
I laugh.

What an appropriate aphorism,
although for the sake of
accuracy
I wear it under my sleeve:
directly on dermis,
self-tanned hide.

I could make a coat
from the leather mistakes
that I wear as shameful jewelry,
or badges on a boy scout's vest.
Signs of merit.
Validation of trials.

There is a silver devil on my shoulder
whipsering sweet nothings
into my ear.

He tells me all the beautiful things
that he could give me:
the rubies and merlot,
garnet chain bracelets
that no one else
is allowed to see.

He croons into my ear,
soft coaxing pounding on my offbeat eardrum:

"Please, baby."
"Don't you love me, baby?"
"Just a little, baby."
You'll love it, baby."

Him, fumbling at my mind
like a teenage rapist pulling down panties,
and me, love drunk on the promises--

I cave.
And a crescendo,
oh,
oh,
I'm
almost--
I'm--
there, lost
in the ecstasy of
bloody satisfaction.

Safe sex is bandages and tape.
I lay cradled in the arms of
home made opiate slumber
and I sleep in the wet spot,
with new jewelry to wear
when I wake up.

FOUR HAIKU ON SEMEN

ON HEALTHY EATING
"Pineapple juice makes
your manjam taste like candy."
turns out he was right.


ON GIFT GIVING
He said he wanted
to give me a pearl necklace.
Boy, was I naive!


ON DIRTY TALK
Semen is not a
sexy word, but then, neither
is "procreation."


ON UNHEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS 
That one Hallowe'en,
they called me Siouxsie Cumshot,
but he never stopped.

He fell in love with
my costume. I don't know if
he knew the difference.

I can only hope
that the he I have now is
no puppetmaster.

I just want to give
the name "Siouxsie Cumshot" back--
maybe just be Ren.

like when all we made were those salty snakes

I woke up this morning and,
finding my body sore and moaning,
checked for bits of broken plaster, chipped metal:
a casting mistake or
impurity of character,

I checked underneath my feet for
markings, a stamp,
the five or ten or two hundred and fifty of
five thousand
I had seen under the feet of
so many others my age--
and found,
to my surprise,
only smooth pink soles.

Knowing myself to be far more cunning
than bronze,
I laughed and reached out
to my aching back and
expected to find splinters to smooth,
to sand my clever wooden body back to
wellness and perfection
as I was carved and
jumped
when my dexterous digits
probed pliant plasticine,
brought back hands covered in
sticky bright bits of blue and pink
of modeling clay
and found those fingers made of the same
bright
sculptor's wax.

My fingertips like sculptor's tools
plunged into my
stop-motion heart and massaged it
into a shape
resembling you
with your polymer eyes and
play-doh smile,
brilliant like the childish hues, lips soft
like the clay
we are made of.

I smooth vibrant modeling clay
across my gaping chest
to contain you in my yielding ribcage and
explore
with hopeful hands
my skull
and find no grey matter
but a rainbow of malleable folds,
glittering synapses
in a brain
beautiful as a box of broken crayons
in the hands of a genius unchanged
by demands of plaster cast
certainties.

We are not statues cast in bronze:
molten metal flowing
velvet-smooth
into predictable molds
for facsimile sculpture.
We are juvenile neons
in malleable clumps
that, with age,
do not harden
and grow brittle
and break when dropped
onto concrete reality.

monsters

I remember when we were all young.
I remember when the monsters lived under beds,
behind closet doors in the dark.

I remember being able to look
and know
with certainty
that monsters are what you cannot see:
what lives beyond vision.

I was half-right.

Real monsters creep
in the dark of your judgment,
the spaces between what you see
and what you fear.

In the dark, we cower and tremble,
seeking protection from monsters in the arms
of just what it is we fear.
We cling to lovers,
monsters in the skin of men.

I remember when I was nineteen.
I remember when I grasped your big hands,
shaking in my own dark.

I remember looking at you
and knowing
with certainty
that you would never hurt me:
that you would keep me safe.

I was wrong.

I am hollow slaughter pinata.
I hang on a meathook.
I swing and wait to be torn to shreds
by claws of a monster lying in my bed.
I sway, dripping out crystalline abstractions of hope,
emptied now of the potential to hold so much
in my crepe paper insides,
to hold anything like you held me
down.

I remember when I was twenty.
I remember when I was dragged across the basement floor,
sweating cold fear.

I remember not being able to look at you
and knowing
with certainty
that monsters are of man and not myth:
that what I thought lived under the bed
lived in mine;
that what they wanted was my heart from my chest.

I was right.

Monsters clean up the murder scene
and hide
with the evidence
in the dark of my closet.
Neatly, my papier mache corpse was hung
to drain
out
childhood
by monsters in manskin.

Cellulose is no match for rapist's claws
and I am no match for the boxes of onion skin memories
that tumbled down into my head
when I flipped the switch.

when i was eighteen, i thought i was a revolutionary

When I was eighteen, I thought I was a revolutionary.
I was a movie star.
My kind of revolution would be televised in shame,
in dark booths with sticky floors,
on pay-per-view late night channels,
written on bathroom stalls.

Imagine this scene:
We enter a movie theatre.
He takes me back to his apartment.
The music swells.
He enters me.

I go home and realize that
the names you don't want to remember
are the hardest to forget.

this place is a graveyard

This place is a graveyard.
You and I, I think we're the walking dead
or walking gods.
Gravediggers, at least.
Standing sentry over minutehand casualties,
battalions of cigarette butts
fallen in ashy coffins:
shallow onyx graves.

We bring more bodies.
Coroner is maybe a better word for what we are,
carrying these cadavers
wasted life in body bags
but that ain't blood, bub,
as bodily fluids go.

We are surrounded by these unmarked graves
lying on our own plush coffin for two,
but you're not Romeo
and I ain't no Juliet.

Our mortal sins bring death
and I know that we're mortal, too,
but we're not dead yet, sugar,
and I know the dead don't make my heart race like you do.

We sing dirges for each corpse
We count them in song,
each moment a funeral march.
We count on tombs.

Perhaps we are walking gods:
Ares, Athena.
We are war lords.

We mark off each skeleton on our calendars
and carry them in the sepulchres of our hearts.

I am a mausoleum in this place of death.

You lay bouquets of funerary kisses on the soft loam
of freshly buried reliquaries,
offerings to each other.

"You make love like I'm a thing to worship," I told you,
so maybe this graveyard is a temple.
Maybe the bones we crush under our holy feet
are our sacrificial alms;
maybe this coffin is the altar you lay me across.

Maybe sanctuary is being shining life amidst
the legions of carrion
we count on
to mark the days.

i bet you say that to all the boys

God, how sweet;
Your hand on mine:
and when I was looking for the right words to say,
you took them.

You took them with your own two lips,
like an old Meatloaf song--
on a hot summer night,
I offered my throat to the wolf with the white Chrysler LeBaron.

Now, all I can do is smile
and giggle
and make us both want to vomit,
because all of a sudden
you're my unicorn, you're all I think about!

What do you think you're doing?
you had to barge in on my
picture perfect
apathetic
self serving
pessimistic
artistic
EXISTENCE.

You see, unicorn,
I had carefully constructed
this caustic nest of comfort for myself.
"Bitter is better," as I always liked to say

And now-- how dare you shatter my
cold
hard
exterior,
my oh so tough oh so angry oh so impenetrable
force field?

How do you expect me to be an icy bitch
when I'm melting into your arms?
How do you expect me to be cool
when your smile warms me up?

Unicorn, this is your fault.
Now everyone will know that I'm--
that's right, folks--
that I'm human.

See what you've done to me, unicorn?
You've exposed me for what I really am!

...you're sticking around, right?

defying the dirty word

Brevity.
That seems, to me, to be
a nice word for
not-being-enough.
Not-being-enough like
my empty wallet
which flaps,
puppetlike
mockingly
in my face.
Not-being-enough for coffee
or for cigarettes
or for a dinner date with a unicorn.

Or not-being-enough like
my pitiful lack of sleep, thank you.
No, really, I mean that.
So when I woke up
heart pounding, head reeling
(or was it the other way around?)
I was still dazed
by the memories still fresh of your hand
gracefully grazing mine,
trembling imitation of lips quivering
waiting
and zen and the art of making out in your car.

You kiss like art.
Your lips drip softness,
clouds of being-enough,
plush, luxurious,
much like the interior of your car
with those bench seats I like so much.

I kiss like a vampire.
I can drink so deeply when lips touch,
an arterial spray of something lush
I can't place, but tastes like
home, like life,
tastes like so much being-enough
and not much like that dirty word.

This so-much cannot be the dearth so evident
in its utterance,
the ringing in it of
empty wallets and
sleepless nights and
what-came-before and
my stunted sense of expression
manifested in my love affair
when-was-before
with
brevity.

what's your poison

I've been getting these headaches, shakes.
My skin crawls over flesh not its own.
Warm front
meets cold front
on the forefront of my mind;
rainstorm and thunder after a
sunny
pheonix
summer.

The realest words for all of this
cannot describe this invisible parasite.

Art is real pain and not champagne,
but these rosé tinted glasses make this night softer,
sweet;
better than a night tinted a darker red,
dripping rubies
thick and draining.

I myself am
cold
bittersweet
dark
like chocolate
like coffee--
it seems your taste in women suits
your taste in beer.

Would you choose the stout or the bubbly?
Tonight, I'm trying not to pick the claret.

you and i, we

you and i, we
  (spelunking this cavern in dark)
find nothing but a shared sense
and you, i
  we
     grasping, our
hands
  (exploding with this burst of lacking)
find brief solace in our (try to understand)
you, i
  we
connect our bodies
a desperate attempt to
   (nos buscamos)
but lost
you, i
  we
    (us)