Egg Tooth

Each relationship I cultivate with another human life

Is a tooth, erupting from my gums,

Armored and available.

You were my egg tooth,

Used to break through the protective shell

In which I was encased.

My walls sank lower 

And lower 

In acquiescence 

And the tooth rose up stronger 

And stronger 

In anticipation.

I asked for warmth and
You handed me a light bulb;

Melted my guts like chapstick that had been 

Left in the car too long.

So is it a coincidence that 

Your body and the earth are filled 

With the same percentage of water?

Because you fell through me like 

A stone falls through the ocean: 

Quickly sinking into a soft ending.

Where I'm From

I'm from the right stock.
I'm from the wrong side of the tracks.
I'm from the old colonial that, named appropriately, invaded and pillaged me even after I left it.
I'm from public schools and public pools
Where little boys brag "I have a bigger head than you" before ducking into choppy, green water.

I'm from my mother; her heart is deep, absorbent purple,
Like new asphalt in the summer.

I'm from Hannaford's; I used to be from Stop n Shop, but when I left home,
I ripped out the power cord connecting myself to my childhood and started fresh.
Fresh, like the produce section.

I’m from the drunken nights that cannot be measured in vomit or so many texts, wryly tossed into the atmosphere of a Friday.
I’m from slowly regaining self control,
Shrouded in a misty cloud of dysphoria.
I’m from the mornings in which I throw the words
"Piece of shit" in my own face most.
I'm from the left lane, which is where I drive 95 mph with
The radio on full volume in an effort to blast her out of my brain.

I’m from a world that I left behind; one that
I was fucking good at.
I’m from the early mornings of buffering a laundry list of insecurities –
Anything but light reading.
I’m from a hero complex, I guess.

I’m from the appointment at a dentist who stuck the only needle
Full of enough novacane to rival the numb I’m feeling now.

Better Now

You can feel the Cheerios in your belly - you can feel each one individually, less like food now and more like 55 separate promises. You catch yourself addressing the hungry urge, which you assumed to be carnal, but it's more than that, really. Halted, pensive, you consider your cigarette for a moment before dismissing the notion. It too is burned up like a series of paintings stolen during the war. After sitting with the idea for a while, you can feel its spores all over you, like being covered in hair after petting a cat. 

That's why you hold your breath when we drive past the house where we grew up. So you don't inhale the spirits of those days. So you don't catch that too. Although these words stretch endlessly in the other direction, you know it's better now.

It's better now.

But you didn't write anything down; you didn't even get a picture on your iphone. You know by the time it's penned, it'll feel like a copy of a copy of a copy, xeroxed into a smother of stray black lines and fuzzy copier static. Sure, you drive too fast, but having a lead foot also means you stop short.

While You Ask Me What I Do For A Living

While you ask me what I do for a living,
I watch for the miniscule gearshift
In your eyes
That accompanies my reply.
It's always in attendance.

Excuse me,
I didn't ask for a ranked list of life choices,
Which you'd drop in my lap before accepting the approval of your friends,
Which you knew was coming
Under an umbrella of "duh's".

May I remind you that my job
Is what you wish you were doing
While you do your own.

Oh, and another thing,
To every self-loathing BuzzFuck Odyssey sell-out bitch,
Writing "Top Ten Most Useless Majors" articles:
Call me when your words are preferable to silence.

Behind Him with the Bit of Lead Piping

It is the unfortunate truth that we spend all day creating our own problems, and then solving them, and then we go to bed thinking we've accomplished something when in reality all that's happened is the torpid turning of this frivolously sardonic wheel turned sideways on itself. World hunger and climate crisis and genocide and 90s sitcoms? If Earth even ever grows the meat to unbury the solutions to these problems, it doesn't matter because they were created here anyway. The entirety of human behavior is so physically inactive, so devoid of function, so circular, the whole deal kind of undoes the magnificently fertile evolutionary procedure. How could such a steady, plodding scheme built on the strong back of guess and check culminate in fast food and Jay Leno? Its like life, all of this strange, prepossessing, tenuous, planetary life auditioned beautifully and then slept through the performance. At the end of the day, the winner of the rat race is still just a rat.

Adulthood is unforgiving, cold, devoid of generosity. It exposes you to certain miscarriages of intimacy like identity theft or when you're driving behind someone and you can see their fingerprints on the trunk.

You see fat mothers hanging their laundry on their fire escapes and you see huge men in their creased, beige work boots draped over the benches around Honeydew Donut shops and you see yourself in the mirror at the end of a day that was too short and all of these things seem to burn the same image onto your retina - an image that will be dissected by your neighbors, misunderstood by your children, sneered over by your coworkers, and borrowed by the actors you watch on TV every weeknight.

Some Water

I fed you
Italian pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and Parmesan cheese
Because the past 19 months have felt
Like you stuck a fork in me
And twirled it.
You are like cutting through sweet fig fruit with stained fingers -
Expecting a seed that is, pleasantly, absent.
And I swear I can smell garlic sautéing when you're thinking.
You, spilling yourself onto me like lemonade,
Running smoothly over my ice cube smile.
What am I supposed to do now after letting both our bellies swell
In comfortable happiness?

You said once that some water tastes better than other water and that's how I knew you understood me - you'd have to notice my thoughts the same way as they drip like subtle condensation from my glass exterior. Truly what you deserve is expensive wine. So I wish I came with a lemon slice or a sprig of mint or a salted rim. I'm sorry I was so filtered back then.

But we grew, like a gourd on the vine. The meat of our conversations was flecked with wonder and strength and a courageous leap into our future together. The spices tasted of ancient families and wrinkled fingers and burlap. These promises, like bell peppers, taste so good but are mostly empty space, I feared.

Lately it's been tasting like the vegetarian version.
Substitutions of you
Won't do.
I'm no baker but I find myself sticking a diagnostic toothpick into us more and more just to test if we're...

And then:
Like butter.
You melt into my arms and you fill me
With your moscato musings and
I am helpless but to the buzz of us.
Us.
Somewhere in the expansive, weedy field,
Another gourd ripens.

One Skeleton

Dear Band-Aid Girl,

How are you? I am fine. When you pulled my life close to yours, you were sitting in a cab somewhere in New York City. I felt so powerful that I could have been driving the car. I remember you told me once or twice how awe-struck you are by the size of the seafloor and how so much of it has been untouched by humans and I thought I detected a note of sympathy in your voice. "Me too," you told the seafloor.

How are you? How are you so... hard? The hard days and the easy days are so mashed together in my mind like beans that you taste like working from home. When I've been swallowing ocean water all day and my body feels numb from the cold, it's your helicopter I ache to see as I come up to the surface. Because you could never make a clean getaway. You could never leave me in a silent saltwater darkness, just loud, tumultuous gasping - storms never leave on good terms. Loving and being loved are two different rivers. Sometimes they meet, but eventually they'll both rush into one ocean.

How are you? "How are you so hard?" she asks me, still in shock by the ease of my attraction and my comfort in being naked even though it's been so many times.

How are you doing this? You must have pretty strong shoulders to be carrying this crap around all day. I could write down all of your secrets and they would fill every square inch of one of your white oxford shirts - I have never seen so many closets in one skeleton.