One Last Moment on the Ground

The people who love me and the 

People who fuck me are never the same people,

But both leave me voicemails.

My voicemail is full. I keep it that way, like a motel - 

Indefinitely full of tenants incapable of moving on.

And I'm living a life full of teachers;

I'm grateful for the teachers.
Thank you for the teachers.

There are teachers in my brake pedals.

There are teachers in my mornings.

There are teachers in my freezer, and in my printer, and
In the hard days

Of no money and no justice.
There are teachers in my voicemail.

As winter ends,

And the days inch longer and longer,

Stretching slowly like a cat does after waking,

I go for runs along the river in my town.

Rounding the corner of the last fence post, 

I can see my porch light.

I sprint, combusting the last of my energy into one final kick.
The porch light is a teacher,
The cold air is a teacher,
The strain in my lungs is a teacher.

It feels like the last moment on the ground before your plane takes off.

Sometimes fight and flight are the same choice.

He Must Have Done Something

I want to write a poem about
The texts you send with the lights off.
I want to write a poem about
Keeping her close to my belly like
A pocket watch.
And watching her take big swings,
Asking me to cancel plans for her.
Snapping my fingers,
While she thinks of the name I can't grasp.
"John Steinbeck...?"

Yes,
That's the one.

Do you think John Steinbeck ever did
Something shameful?
D'you think he ever did
Something that felt yucky?
Something that resembled worms
When the memory slithered
Through his gut?
He must have done something.
Maybe a lie.
Or a low.

Yes,
That's the one.

Cortico Sport

Teeming with tunnel vision and little else,
The tot leaps off the slippery deck and
Flings herself into the depths below.
Five and a half feet of pool water is not terribly deep
But a toddler can drown in one, you know.

My mother moved with such swiftness
That any onlooker would have thought this
Was a coordinated succession.
First one
Then the other.

In fact it was born from a panic
So promordial it takes no input
From higher order cortical areas.

Just adrenaline and impulse.
It was a nudge from the brainstem
From my mother's brain's mother itself:
"Your child is in danger. Save your child."

The two plunged
One right after the other
And for the next nearly two decades
Neither would surface.
Not really.

The Covers

I'm in an Uber home,

Cruising into the sunrise.

I'm filled with something right now.
I don't know what it is but it sounds like Nora Jones.

In the bar... twelve hours ago.

The Cranberries we're playing.
But when we got in bed and she slid two fingers under my belt...

Others in my hair. The liquor made my lips numb but I can still feel...
It sounded more like Stairway to Heaven. Or Sonic Youth's Superstar.

Making tea in the kitchen at midnight
To Jack Johnson.
And then watching her splashing a shot of Jack Daniels into her elephant mug of black tea.
Sly smile through eyes that told me she wanted
To catch up to me.

Because she was still on Jack Johnson
And I felt more like Sex and Candy.

Now the driver's fingers brush over the volume dial;

Some 2009 karaoke number is flooding through the speakers.

I can't hear it.

The Chasm

I am not an announcement.

I am not one big achievement that carries me like a 

Wave to the next peak in my life.

I am a slow, mounting anthill 

Of tiny swells towards ideas about which nobody is more excited than me.

I'm not "down for whatever".

I am an edifice.

I come with multiple contingency plans.

There is nothing instant about my gratification,

And I've never taken a shower that wasn't hot as fuck,

And I feel as big as the ocean,

And as deep as a drum,

And as mammoth as a barrel full of wine.

You'd have me sleeping with one eye open 

But fuck that because I am a force,

And even when I am buried in the ground,

I will continue to form earthquakes until 

The house of your memory has fallen into the chasm of me.

Cricket

Lovesick again
Touch myself but with your hands
Moon rises higher
Attached to my heart with a rope
Like walking a dog
For ten hours straight

Cricket
It knows what I've been up to
Takes six eyes to catch it all
There's a lot you'll miss
With just your two

Didn't get high today
Makes the hours go by too fast
Everyone knows
That's no good when you're lovesick

Movies in Your Head

I still drive by some houses and struggle
Not to picture her curtains in the windows
And our babies at the breakfast table.

This house, however, is punctuated with a cop car,
Parked in the driveway like an exclamation mark.
Wait, I don't mean a police precinct squad vehicle.
I mean it looks like the type of muscled out,
Dark, tinted car that a cop drives off duty.
The one he takes home, fingers twitching for
An unreliably absent weapon.

When her fingers twitch, it's in her sleep,

The universe unexpectedly giving me space to owe it something later.

"Here," it coos, "Have her amber voice - sweet, and dark, and clear, like translucent maple syrup. Here, have her failures; even they are controlled demolitions. Here, have her keyboard clicks; they are bullets. Here, have her orgasms; they use the tongue muscle in its entirety. Here, have her words; they are spoken darts, sprung from a barrel at top speed."