Underscore

It's not that I'm afraid of going
anywhere — it's just that I prefer

museums, theaters and libraries
and those are all too expensive,

too far away, or too self-aware.
I cannot slip into a seat at the movies

and forget who I am. I have not
driven over the 10th street bridge

this year and it does not look like I will.
Add that to the tab. Pull more weight

than you are used to, and you will
glide with ease the second you are

pruned naked. This is my experience.
My exhibition has grown stuffy and

dangerously familiar with mold.
Who demands my youth to arrange

its end? Is there not enough of it going around,
are there not enough failures fucking around?

I see them day and night, they twist my words,
and shower me with shouts of gaiety.

Locked in the daze of false-bottom days,
I bungle their poise and potential.

Show me some good, honest work,
and I'll show you how it lies.

how we make friends

have you no friends? we'll patch that right up.
open the trunk, make sure you didn't leave

any in there. nothing but secondhand
lamps and fuzzy amps, we're good here.

have you found yr friend? thought we was
just pulling the beard on the grandfather clock

waiting for him to come down. make sure
they know we're coming. we wouldn't want

to let the elevators down. each gilded button
busts a gut when pressured. falling on your ass

does not have to be ugly. we are courting
so many yet-to-be friends with our ass-falling.

how many friends? i can only count em up so fast,
but the wall, he counts, we went over this

last weekend when our locks took stock of their options
and decided it was best to just let anyone in.

bedtime blues

the door creaks as I shuffle off to bed

when my room looking bleak as the day

one year ago when I was hot to start living

in it starts to speak to me: why did you leave

so many things unfinished just look at me

and I would say I am sorry but for what

nothing lives in here there is no buried speech

vibrating off the walls no one wants to listen

and I am not ashamed to sleep in the same dirty

sheets and smell the way I sweated with guilt

after I had pushed away what crowded me close

too close I was to figuring it all out 

what it meant when I opened the door to my room

and saw the discarded laundry in so many piles

and not one but two desks my back hurts to sit at

and the gloom that sticks to my feet 

laying in bed weighing each day of the past year

in the sighing scale of my sharpshooting brain

the crosshairs rest on each moment that changed me

but knowing that despite the labyrinth I labor over

I will wake in the same straightjacket of circumstance

wishing a successful death over another year of half-failures

but I know that the room is dark and daring me to do

what I have always known how to do

it is no longer a matter of getting better or being the best

it is about carving a space that echoes love for my name